Hello out there,

The season turned. Without a doubt and quite abruptly. Went to my car this morning and leaves were falling into the parking lot, brushing against the windshield, and starting to litter the ground. All changes change.

And I am always unsure of what I am going to write about each month. Autumn? Ode? Keats?

No.

I turn to the moment. The now.

During this last week an article appeared in the New York Times describing the brutal murder of a homeless woman in Central Park. The details are awful. The woman, a lover of birds, a painter of birds, was found stabbed and mutilated in the Ramble. A young man, also homeless, walked into the police station and announced himself as the perpetrator of the crime.

But for me this was a personal story. The woman, whose name I knew as Lee, had been a friend of my half-sister. The two of them, wandering through Central Park, bonded over birds. For a time they were close friends, so much so that my sister sheltered her in her own home off and on for number of years. It’s a complicated story, not mine to tell, but suffice it to say the terrible end to Lee’s life was a strange outcome to the part of the story I already knew.

Ten years ago, in my book, Word Has It, published by Nirala Series, I included a poem about my sister and her friend, Lee.

Here is that poem:

A Family Story

My sister is enchanted by a homeless woman who paints birds. Together they wander Central Park filling bird feeders, leaving trails of seeds. This reads like the seed of a fairy tale but could be the beginning of another kind of story. My father, who is also my sister’s father, spent the last years of his life almost homeless. That is to say he lived like a homeless person in an apartment in Paris. And “apartment in Paris” also sounds like the beginning of someone’s fairy tale. But as it turns out the apartment in Paris was one room filled with old newspapers, broken furniture, and food rotting on broken plates. You get the picture. After he died my sister was the one to clean it up. Now, when it gets cold or wet, the homeless woman who paints birds moves into my sister’s one room apartment. The homeless artist hangs her paintings on my sister’s walls and pays for breakfast. She takes the dying cat to the vet. The birds, lately mostly owls, look on.

As I revisited this piece after reading about Lee’s death I was particularly struck by the last line, in which I invoke owls. Owls are, in some mythologies, harbingers of death or, alternatively, as companion to the goddess Athena, a symbol of wisdom and truth. The poem seems to anticipate a tragic end, a specter of death hanging over the complicated sets of relationships described in the poem. I realized that I had written what might be called an “anticipatory elegy,” as if in writing the poem I had some foresight or intuition that there would be a tragic end to the story. Elegy both honors a being who has died and, in some sense, brings them back to life. Usually, an elegy is written after a death, but here I seem to have written an elegy well in advance of the death. I’ve done that in other poems as well – written poems that anticipate a death without any conscious reason for doing so. The ancients understood the entwinement of poetry and prophecy, the poet as a vatic voice – speaking with a knowledge beyond information or logic.

Is that what anticipatory elegy amounts to? Or, is writing into the unknown, as I believe a poet should, simply an occasion to awaken a deeper intuition, a poetic spidey- sense, a way of knowing that is beyond knowing.

The last section of Word Has It, dominated by the presence of birds in all of the poems, claims failure on the part of the poet to predict or understand the future. The speaker is wrong. The truth was always in the poems. The owls didn’t lie.

Rest in peace, Lee Rogers, May we all be forgiven for our failures.

Hello readers,

I’m back. Summer is waning. The arts season is starting. And I have surprise on my mind. That is to say that it’s been a surprising summer. The heat was on – or off. The peaches were terrific but not abundant – bad weather did a job on them. I thought I would get a lot done, but oh, how serious life intervened. I’m finally getting to it.

But now I’m back. And that is a pleasant surprise.

I talk about surprise a lot. But I need to think about what I mean when I’m talking. And particularly when I’m talking about poems. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” (Frost and others say this) This is both a statement about process (the writer’s) but also about reception (the reader’s experience.) What’s that experience? What actually does surprise a reader.? I don’t think the poem jumps out of the dark and says “boo!”

No, not that. But when a poet defies our expectations, sees things in a way that bends our minds into unexpected places, that’s surprise.

By way of example (and a perfect late summer poem) let me offer you (yes, a bit of a chestnut) a poem by James Wright:

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another   
Into the distances of the afternoon.   
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Copyright Credit: James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island,
Minnesota” from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose. Copyright � 1990
by James Wright. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. Source: Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (1990)

It’s a short poem in which nothing much happens. And yet there are so many surprises and delights within that “nothing.” First of all, look at long title. It’s not what we expect in a title. There’s so much detail there. So much about location. And what about the first word “Lying.” We don’t notice the double meaning but it’s there, lurking. And who is “William Duffy” and where and what is “Pine Island.” As we move into the poem we imagine we will answer some of those questions,

But actually, no. The opening lines connect a butterfly (something light and airy, known for flight,) with bronze, (something fabricated and heavy), a surprising link. That butterfly is asleep, being rustled by wind. There is no volition, just a kind of torpor that reminds us of the speaker in his hammock. There is black and shadow and an empty house. A kind of stillness dominates. The drowsiness of the afternoon, a state that welcomes quiet.

Bur then we hear cowbells. No cows. Where are the cows? The sounds are moving away; the unseen cows move into the distance. The speaker’s solitude is reinforced. There is no sign of Mr. Duffy. The speaker is alone.

Precise in his location science, the speaker directs us to his “right” where there is a field of sunlight between two pines. After all the darkness and distance, we do not expect the arrival of light. And then we have the information about last year’s “horse droppings” that “blaze up into golden stones.” A transformation. Dung to gold. More powerful than bronze. A glory in the waning day. I can’t help but have a happy moment of surprise.

But it’s a moment. A chicken hawk in the sky, precisely overhead, searching for home. The darkness returns.

And then the kicker of a last line “I have wasted my life.” That is a surprise, seems to come out of nowhere. Is this a moment when the poem jumps out and says “boo?” Many essays have been written about Wright’s line. We have, throughout the poem, watched the poet transform an expected pastoral into something both darker and more gorgeous than the literal. The title is literal, with a kind of pointless specificity. The poem is all transformation. It also tips its hat to time and mortality. One way of reading the poem has been to suggest that in the end poem- making is a waste. But if, dear reader, you go back to the very first word of the title, “Lying,” you may conclude as I like to do, that in fact, this is a poem that honors poem-making and the transformative power of the imagination to sustain and comfort us in the face of our own torpor and mortality.

The change of seasons is unavoidable. Let us take comfort where we find it –

See you next month.

Ruth

Hello everyone,

Well, as I write we are in the middle of a heat wave. I’m torn about this – I am one of those strange creatures that thrives in the heat—it energizes me. That said, I know so many people really suffer in this hot weather, so I hope you are cool and safe and comfortable wherever you are.

I’m writing between two events and anticipating a third. Let me tell you about these because they really do capture some of what being a laureate involves.

On June 19th I hosted a marathon reading of the United States Constitution. Seventeen volunteer readers took turns reading portions of the Constitution for an audience about the same size. We read the entire document, accompanied by brilliant commentary from Professor Beau Breslin, Professor of Political Science at Skidmore College. He’s a Constitutional expert, a frequent guest on WAMC’s The Round Table, and a kind, funny, and generous human being. We were supported by the Veterans Organizations of Beacon, who welcomed us and nourished us, literally and metaphorically.

This was a particularly meaningful project for me. For one thing, it was truly collaborative. In addition to the volunteer readers and the Veterans and Beau Breslin, I was joined in the effort by Mike Jurkovic, Ulster’s current poet Laureate, and Stephanie JT Russell, my immediate predecessor as Dutchess Laureate. Collaboration and civic engagement mean a lot to me and this event realized a vision that I’ve had for a while. Mike, Stephanie, and I will be collaborating on a number of such readings in various Hudson Valley locations and I hope some of you reading this will volunteer for one or more of these events or join us as audience members.

What moved me deeply was the spirit that emerged in the room. The readers were serious, involved, but not solemn. After a short while of reading questions emerged spontaneously and it felt to me that we were all engaged in a shared adventure of learning. That was the point. My belief that we all need to know more about the Constitution was heightened after I was elected to the Howland Library Board of Trustees last year. I had to petition, get signatures to be on the ballot, and then do well enough in the election to arrive on the Board. I had to be sworn in, taking the familiar oath to defend and protect the Constitution. I stood (yes, you must stand) with my hand over my heart and repeated the words. I found myself tearing up. This is what it meant to be in a community, to participate in a democracy. I had always voted, always taken that seriously, but this was something else. This was agreeing to do some of the unglamorous labor of building a society and a community. And if in the course of that I was swearing to protect and defend a document all of us should know what is actually in the document and what that document created. I learned from Beau Breslin that Thomas Jefferson believed that the Constitution should be revised once every generation. That doesn’t happen but Jefferson’s idea is a good reminder that the Constitution is a living document and like any living thing must be cared for and attended to.

My adventure in community continues on July 4th. I will be debuting a poem I was asked to write for Beacon’s 4th of July celebration. In my last letter I wrote about the problems of the “occasional” poem. I had to find a way of writing a poem that would be true to my feelings about the fraught times we are living in. I knew I couldn’t write polemic. I didn’t know if I could write anything at all. But I did write something quite personal and I will read it on July 4th at the Veterans Memorial Building in Beacon. The ceremony starts at 11 am. I’ve created a limited edition signed broadside (a one page publication of the poem) that I will distribute at the event. The ceremony will be followed by an ice cream social at Madame Brett’s Homestead in Beacon. It will be hot, so we’ll need to eat the ice cream before it melts.

Finally, on July 17th I am curating a poetry reading for 6 poets (including me) from the Hudson Valley and beyond. This reading will feature Lucia Cherciu, a former Dutchess County Laureate and poets from China. Far and near. Near and far. 7 pm at the Howland Cultural Center, 477 Main Street in Beacon. Don’t miss this one.

I’ll be taking off the month of August so no letter then. When I return in September I’ll have thoughts about paradox and juxtaposition in poetry, but we need cooler weather for that.

Have a great summer.

Hello, happy summer at last –

When I was named Poet Laureate I had one abiding terror – that I would be asked to compose “occasional” poems. These are poems that are commissioned for particular events or occasions. Sometimes the occasions are personal – a friend’s wedding, a birthday, a funeral, an anniversary. Often the events are public – national holidays, presidential inaugurations, Arbor Day, Mother’s Day, the 4th of July. These public poems are the purview of occasional poetry. The occasions are predictable, and unfortunately, many poems honoring such events are predictable as well. Generally speaking, occasional poems are supposed to uplift and exalt. The object is to provide hope rather than reflection or sober assessment or, perhaps, hope mitigating some sober assessment. The enterprise is fraught with the likelihood of cliché, false feeling, and oversimplification. The point is to praise, not to critique or examine, two forms of speech action that provide strong poems with nuance and depth.

One reason I was terrified of being asked to write an occasional poem is that I don’t want to write bad poems and my deep belief is that the very nature of the occasional constraint forces the poems into what I’m calling “the land of the bad.” If you’ve been reading my notes for a while you know I believe that writing into the unknown is the only way to find what needs saying – call the unknown, then, “the land of the good.”

And then of course, in spite of assurances to the contrary, I was asked by very kind people to write something first for Arbor Day and then for the 4th of July. Arbor Day was fine – I like trees a lot and already had something I could read. I vetted it before I read it and got an okay. Fourth of July was trickier. I do have the sense, often, that as Samuel Johnson famously said, “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” I certainly did not want to be a scoundrel. I knew that I would have to write honestly or not at all. And my very upset feelings about the state of our country and the world affect me deeply. I couldn’t write a “rah rah” poem. At the same time, I did not want to offend the kind people who had offered me an opportunity to present new work to the public. So I told the kind people that I would write something and if they liked it, I would read it and if they didn’t there would be no hard feelings and I would just go away quietly. It took a bit of wrestling with myself, but I did write something I felt honest about, and happily, the kind committee did like what I had written, and so this new poem will have its debut in Beacon this July 4th . at Madame Brett’s Homestead. My poem will not be as sweet as the ice cream but it does have some idyllic moments in it. If you come ,you’ll see and I’m creating a signed and numbered broadside that I will distribute at the event.

Also this month I’m staging an event that I’ve been working on for a while. On June 19th (Juneteenth, please remember this important national holiday) there will be a marathon reading of the United States Constitution at the Veterans Memorial Building in Beacon. From 12-4 a group of volunteer readers will read every word of our founding document. The reading will be supported by commentary and interpretation from Professor Beau Breslin, Constitutional expert at Skidmore College. Professor Breslin is a frequent panelist on WAMC’s Round Table panel and his wit, knowledge, and intelligence will be on full display on June 19th .

These events help me to understand the public function of a Poet Laureate. I can say publicly that I am dismayed by the state of our nation and our world and with my work as poet and curator I can bring some attention to the crises of the moment. Perhaps we can all be more alert and perhaps poetry has a role to play in creating that alertness. Sometimes an occasional occasional poem has its place.

You’ll have to wait til the 4th of July for my poem but here is a great occasional poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

I Am Waiting
BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

I am waiting for my case to come up   
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting   
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier   
and I am waiting   
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming   
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona   
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored   
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find   
the right channel   
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth   
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed   
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered   
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did   
to Tom Sawyer   
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting   
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again   
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn   
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting   
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

Copyright Credit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting” from A Coney Island of the Mind.
Copyright © 1958 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Hello,

It is spring, indeed, and the vagaries of April seem to be continuing in May. Flowers are blooming on trees but it’s still a bit colder than I like. Around me there’s much talk of planting and growing and that means a lot of weed pulling and pruning. I live in an apartment with only a tiny balcony and not much dirt, so I am required to turn to other forms of corrective action.

So, to stay in the spirit of pulling and pruning I’m going to entertain you with some rebellious thoughts about revision, that exciting and scary process of re-seeing what has already been written with an idea to what such writing needs on its way to flowering as a finished piece. (Should I, dear reader, get rid of the alliteration? Should I revise?)

Lots of things are said about revision. For instance “writing is revision.,” implying that all texts must be revised. Or the chestnut about the poet who spends all day taking out a comma only to put it back in the next day. Or vice versa. The message from that is there is slow deliberation and careful decision-making. Everything stays tentative, even arbitrary, provoking anxiety. Revision is serious business.

But really? Does it have to be? Do all texts arrive incomplete and immature? Do all texts require therapy? Let’s challenge that notion with further investigation.

When I was at NYU teaching in the adult degree program, I was in charge of both creative and expository writing. That meant I got to design the curriculum, hire and train faculty, run programs that supported the curriculum and generally have my way with all things writing. I developed an introductory course called “Foundations of Creative Process.” It was offered every semester, featured visiting writers in one meeting each week and writing in another. It was popular and truly helpful and inspiring to so many people, many of whom went on to become serious, publishing writers.

Every semester the very patient woman who had the difficult task of organizing the schedule for the entire program would list the course as “Foundations of the Creative Process” and I, equally patient, would trot down the hall to her office to ask her to revise the listing. I couldn’t offer a course that announced that there was such a thing as “the creative process” because that would suggest a singular process, one that I was purportedly teaching. And the point of the course was that each writer was to discover his or her own way of working. “Process” as specific to each person, not a universal recipe. Ultimately the goal was to create artistic independence – agency, authority, and originality not just in the work but in one’s way of working.

Such agency pertains to revision as well. If you accept my notion that the poet is writing into the unknown, then the first task would be to find out what has been uncovered or discovered or understood. What is the poem inside the draft? That is a matter of reading. Before even thinking

about revision, you have to know what you have.

One famous instance of major revision can be seen in the process that produced Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” one of her most famous poems. Twenty - two drafts it took her. Imagine that. It started out as a mess of language. She then began to isolate words, made the decision to write it as a villanelle and proceeded from there. Reading the initial messy draft let her know what she was writing about but the progress through the draft led to further revisions. This is an example of “writing as revision.” That’s one way of doing it.

And there’s collaborative revision. Pound lopped off huge swaths of text at the beginning of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” and contributed often acerbic suggestions for changes to this major poem. It’s sort of the opposite approach to take the comma out put it back in approach. That was major pruning. Pound could “see” the poem before Eliot did.

Please take it from me that revision and editing are two entirely different matters. “Revision” is a form of “seeing again, re-seeing.” But before you “re-see” you must “see.” Many writers are afraid to look at early drafts and miss the opportunity to engage with their own thoughts, feelings, and ideas. Editing is a much later action. Kind of like tucking the sheets in after you’ve made the bed. We can forget that for now. Let’s leave the bed messy.

Sometimes poems don’t get revised. They get written in one sitting. This is true of many Chinese and Japanese calligraphic poems. They are precise meditations that are simultaneously visual and textual. Ezra Pound provides uses the one draft technique in this famous small poem that attempts to capture the spirit of Chinese and Japanese poetry.

In a Station of the Metro
Ezra Pound

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Not all one- draft poems are short. Consider Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” written in one morning as Keats sat under a tree. One-draft construction does not eliminate spontaneous revision. In Keats’ case it seems that he largely revised this poem as he was writing it. Later refinements, as the poem was prepared for publication, could be considered “editing” rather than revision. Tucking in the sheets.

Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died,” was actually written on the very day Billie Holliday died, while the poet was on his lunch break, working to capture the immediacy of his experience. Typically, O’Hara did not revise.

Lots of women writers created work that was unrevised. Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath. Lorine Niedecker, Adrienne Rich. Writing raw produced wonders from them.

So no, revision is not a requirement. Each poet, perhaps each poem, makes use of a different form of attention. I’ve had poems that have taken 8 years of attention to arrive at a stopping place. I’ve had poems that seem to have written themselves that required no changes. Every book I’ve done requires a different method of construction. I cannot name “the creative process,” nor can I make a recipe of “the process of revision.”

What I can say and what I do believe is that reading one’s own new work without fear is hard and important and that is the only universal process I can name or commit to.

See you in June.

Hello Readers and Writers,

It’s spring, finally. Today I sat outdoors and drank coffee with friends. Daffodils have sprung forth and the forsythia is in bloom. In spite of difficulty, loss, danger, hard times, a long winter, an uncertain future, we can, for a moment, take a breath.

And the beauty of the warm day is not entirely an April Fool’s joke, though the phone app tells me we have rain today and tomorrow. Good that now I’m inside.

I have to tell you that April is a lie. A liar, A trickster. Fickle and sad as much as it’s all re-birthy and spring-y.

And that brings me to National Poetry Month, when poets come out to play. Well, maybe not exactly play, though play is, to my mind, at the heart of the patterned language we name as poetry. It’s a month when we poets want everyone to fall in love with poetry.

And April has special meaning for poets – think of Chaucer.

Here bygynneth the Book of the tales of Caunterbury

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, 
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, 
And bathed every veyne in swich licóur 
Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

After those sweet showers , poets have much to say about spring. Here are excerpts from two poets, one modern, one contemporary, expressing more complicated views of the season.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Edna St Vincent Millay “Spring”

or

I’m saying I know all about you, whoever you are, it’s spring   
and it’s starting again, the longing that begins, and begins, and begins.

Kim Addonizio “Onset”

There’s so much confusion in the sudden protrusion/profusion of life into what has been dead for so long, for such a long winter.

Truth be told, I hate the month of April. I hate the flip flops from warm to cold from sun to rain from rain to snow and and and – it’s all unpredictable. And I hate the memories of bad things that have happened to me in April – my first serious boyfriend dumped me in April. My mother, worn down into the shape of a tiny comma in her high bed, died in April. I nearly died in April, but then, miraculously didn’t – it’s complicated and sad and so full of life and death and promise of more.

No one describes this complexity better than T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land, a poem that long ago achieved chestnut status and is reviled by many (I’ll get to that in a minute) but really, who can resist these opening lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding . . .

This poem, written in 1922, just following the end of World War I, cultivated the ground for so many “April” poems that followed. Turning the “sweetness” of Chaucer on its head, the poem articulates the despair that followed the war and the simultaneous unhappiness that Eliot experienced in his marriage to his first wife.

The poem has been over-explicated, reviled for its many and obscure literary references, its footnotes (put into poem at the suggestion of Leonard and Virginia Woolf to fill out their Hogarth Press edition of the poem. Eliot thought of the notes as a kind of joke.), its dependence on Ezra Pound’s editing, and what people consider its “difficulty,” and “obscurity.” Eliot himself is reviled for his Anglicanism, his sometimes-anti-semitism, his conservatism, and his general tendency to be fastidious and withholding. These charges are valid and true.

But then there’s the poem. It’s the poem that made me want to be a poet. I first read it when I was around fifteen. For every birthday and Christmas (yes, we were Jewish and celebrated Christmas) my mother gave me a box of books. Eliot arrived in one such box. I remember looking at the dust cover, with Eliot’s picture on the front. When I turned to The Waste Land two things happened. First, I realized I didn’t understand anything I was reading. Second, I realized that I was getting goosebumps as I read. Something was happening to me, in my body, and I knew it was the poem acting on me. What I could not understand intellectually I could feel experientially. That, I understood, was what poems could and should do.

Over the years I read and studied the poem. I explored the footnotes. They did not explain my experience of the poem. They did lead me to read many pieces of literature I would not have known otherwise. I loved that the poem kept opening up for me as I began to understand its patterns, which turned out to be an elaboration of the opening lines. And every time I read it, I had the same goosebumpy experience. The poem made me feel alive. It made me feel. And isn’t that what poems are supposed to do?

Go get a copy of the The Waste Land. You can read it online but so much better to hold it in your hand. Read it. Don’t try to “interpret” it. Don’t try to research it. You can do that next winter when it’s cold and you need something to do. Just read it, read parts out loud. Experience it. Feel yourself coming alive.

Happy Spring. I’ll be back in May.

Hello readers,

It’s almost March and time for another letter from your friendly Dutchess County Laureate. It’s been a hard winter so far and I hope everyone has managed the cold and snow without incident.

In what must have been the second or third grade we were all asked to answer the question “What do Daddies do all day?” We were supposed to answer this assumption loaded question with details about our fathers’ occupations. My problem was that I didn’t know because my father didn’t live with us and the breadwinner in my household was my doctor-mother. When I explained this at school, I was told that “mothers can’t be doctors.”

This memory came after I started thinking about that readers might wonder about Poets Laureate. What DO they do all day? Next month is National Poetry Month and I will focus on actual poetry, so I thought that this month I would tell you a little bit about what I do as Laureate and some of what I will be doing in April, which will be a busy month.

So – what do I do as Laureate?

Well, do a lot of what helped me get nominated for the role in the first. Yes, I write and publish and give readings – but above all the Laureate is active within the community she represents. So, I curate readings and events that I hope will interest different audiences. Curating not only involves designing the event, asking poets to participate, raising grant money from Poets and Writers to pay the artists. I believe that poets should be paid for their work and so I do my best to see that this happens. At 7 pm on April 17th I’ll be presenting 4 poets who are also book publishers. This event will take place the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon. John Yau (Black Square Editions,) Elizabeth Murphy, (Grid Books,) Michael Broder (Indolent Books,) and Stephen Motika (Nightboat) will read their work and discuss the relationship between their work as poets and their experience as publishers.

One project I’m developing along with a number of other curators in both Dutchess and Ulster County excites me a great deal. We are working to present marathon readings of the United States Constitution. Writers and performers will each present a portion of this crucial document. I’m thrilled to say that Professor Beau Breslin, a professor of Constitutional history and law, and who you may have heard on WAMC’s Round Table, will provide interpretive commentary as the readings progress. I believe that poets must address the very concerning events of this moment in history without resorting to polemic or propaganda. While these are not “poetry readings” they are a way for the Laureates among us to make meaning at this time. My hope is that these readings will help our communities understand what we are defending when we say we are “defending the Constitution.”

In April I will be the interlocutor at a launch of a memoir by a colleague and friend. I’m reading the book now and am wowed. It will be a pleasure to be in conversation with Donna Minkowitz about Growing Up Golem. This event will be at 7pm April 10 the at the Howland Cultural Center in Beacon.

And on April 1 I’ll be reading my own work at the Lagrangeville Library. (Wednesday, April 1st at 6:00 p.m. LaGrange Association Library. 1110 Rt. 55, Lagrangeville NY 12540.)  You need to register through their website and space is limited.

On April 3rd I’ll feature for Calling All Poets.

(Details about all these events and others will appear on the Laureate page of the Arts Mid-Hudson site)

Not all the work of a Laureate is public. Twice a week I teach so I put a great deal of time into developing class plans. Just before starting to write this note, I mailed off a letter of recommendation for a student I am mentoring. She is applying to graduate school and I have worked with her to get her application in order. In the next room is the draft of a book a fellow writer has asked me to read and comment on. I’m almost finished reading it. Another person I’ve mentored wrote me this morning asking for blurb (supporting statement) for her first full length collection of poems. Of course I said yes and while I was writing this note to you she sent me the manuscript to read. Both very quiet forms of Laureate activity.

Watching audiences come to events and students succeed gives me enormous pleasure and satisfaction. All of the work, public and private, requires constant attention and engagement. That’s the life of this Laureate.

See you in April.

Hello all,

It’s a cold, hard winter and yet February is the month when we celebrate Valentine’s Day, a day of love. True enough, but I am not going to write about love poetry, its history (it’s old), its variety (it’s complicated), or its ubiquity (too many) and not even its pitfalls (so prone to cliché.)

Rather I want to write about the poet’s (at least my) hate and love of poetry. I had a student many years back who said to me: “Writing poetry is the thing I hate the most that I love the best.” And quite famously, it has been said by more than one writer “I love to have written.”

In other words, the relationship between many poets and their making of poems can be fraught. A writer like me, who writes into the unknown, is inevitably venturing into risky territory. If I go into the dark woods or even a vast open prairie, I don’t know what I will find. I might find something I didn’t want to find or know, a proud, antlered elk or a silly goose. I might even find a bear. I might find what is preoccupying me even if I don’t know what it is before I write the words.

The blank page beckons and all my desire to fill it with the “right words in the right order” could be stifled by my fear of what I might find – that is the real terror of the blank page – not that I won’t write anything (the weather is a surefire starting point) but that what I write might be revelatory in ways that are hard to bear. So difficult that it might yield tears. That’s what Frost said – “no tears for the writer no tears for the reader.” What might be lurking there, just beyond conscious awareness, should be surprising (a gift) but can also be disturbing (also a gift, though of a different kind.) And yet I can’t resist the seduction. We want to know. That is the desire that we poets (at least I,) yield to. To allow such desire is to risk disappointment. (the poem might be bad or contrived or untrue, even after I open up to the page.) And no one wants to be disappointed. The precarity created in the tension between fear and possibility is what I (and other writers) live with. Sometimes I just hate that precarity.

What I love, though, to quote the poet Jenny Boully, is that in writing a poem (or anything, even this little essay) “one starts out with nothing and ends up with something.” Something that had never existed before the writing began is now a “something” in the world. (I had no idea Jenny Boully would pop up just then. Nor did I know how much this essay would employ parentheticals!) But the pleasure of such surprises is irresistible, And the possibility of sharing surprises with readers is also irresistible. It’s two layers of love – the love that goes into the writing and the love that sharing the writing with readers reveals.

The poem is where the writer and reader meet. The most interesting poems engage the reader in an act of co-creation. As I’ve said before – poems (at their best) don’t deliver a message. They create an experience that the writer and reader share. The poem achieves its fulfillment when the writer and reader come together. Writers need readers. Readers need writers. That is love. That is a kind consummation.

Just recently, after focusing on prose, I’ve returned to the practice of writing poems almost every day. Yesterday, sure that I had nothing in me but exhaustion, I began to write. My first words admitted my fear that I had no words:

I wish I had
words
but I don’t

Seems like my impasse was with writing itself. It seemed so to me. But then, this happened:

I wish
a wash
of tears
would come
but they don’t

I wish it weren’t
a cold climate
but it is

I wish the dead
had not died
in a cold country
but they did

I discovered in just a few lines my inarticulate and helpless grief about the terrible events in Minneapolis over the last few weeks. That was my first discovery.

The second discovery was that almost all the words were monosyllables and so in revision I moved towards making the entire poem monosyllabic, revealing a speaker barely able to get any words out at all. The draft, small as it was, gave me information about content and form and how those connect in this piece. How happy I am to have written this not very happy poem that I want to share with you. I don’t want any of us to feel alone in this moment.

Here is the poem, revised:

Monosyllabic

I wish I had
words
but I don’t

I wish
a wash
of tears
would come
but they don’t

I wish it were not
a cold land
but it is

I wish the dead
had not died
by cold hands
but they did

Thank you. Happy Valentine’s Day every day of the year.

Hello all,

Happy New Year! I hope you’ve had wonderful holidays and are ready for a new year. I’m happy to be starting my second year as Poet Laureate and am excited about upcoming events and projects, which I will detail in future notes.

We are now in the depth of winter even though we’ve passed the solstice and the days are, quietly, getting a little bit longer. We’ve had our first big snow and so it seems fitting to use this opportunity to share with you some thoughts about one of my favorite winter poems – “The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens.

In my last note I wrote about “The Day Lady Died,” by Frank O’Hara, in which the poet narrates the experience of remembering the death of Billie Holliday. Step by step O’Hara leads the reader to have the same experience he had. The Stevens poem is quite different. In five 3-line stanzas the poet leads the reader through an experience of mind as it engages with the natural world in a way that defies easy pastoralism or sentimentality. While O’Hara’s poem is deeply personal, Stevens’ is philosophical.

Here is the poem:

The Snow Man

BY WALLACE STEVENS

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

source: Poetry Magazine 1921

The poem begins by introducing two significant terms. “One must have a mind of winter” – “mind” and “winter” coexist on the same line. An abstract noun is paired with a concrete image. The poem tosses us between the two. One reading of the opening is that one must have a “wintry mind – one that is cold and pristine (our immediate associations with the word “winter.”) Another way to read the line is that one must keep winter in mind – that is to say, one must pay attention to see what is actually “out there.” In the next lines we are asked to “regard” and then “behold” visual features of the landscape, a pastoral view of a winter world, one that might appear on a greeting card. But Stevens, in his one sentence poem, shifts ground and urges the reader not to engage in projection – not to imagine that there is “misery” in the “sound of the wind.” The misery is not in nature but in the human mind attaching its own emotions to what is neutral ground. Stevens warns against the pathetic fallacy – the idea that nature mirrors human emotion. Landscape is a construction of the human mind (something that Simon Schama also says in his book Landscape and Memory.) We see this constructive process explored explicitly in another Stevens poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” in which a human being places “a jar in Tennessee” such that the human placement of the jar organizes the landscape around itself to create whatever meaning is to be found when human and natural worlds intersect.

In “The Snow Man” the poet moves the reader from visual perception to sound. The viewer becomes a “listener” – the sound the wind makes is what the listener hears. The listener is a lone figure, separate from the land, who, in his isolated and dispassionate condition (he is “nothing,” a mere blip on the earth, now “beholds” (that word comes back) only what is actually there and then, surprisingly “the nothing that is.” The use of the article “the” reveals the third “nothing” as the existential reality of nothingness. You can almost imagine 31 Atlas shooting through that nothingness. The reader has been moved from simple perception to existential contemplation, the “nothings” of the last stanza link the poem to the terrible negations at the end of King Lear. Stevens’ poem starts humbly and ends wisely with a kind of cosmic view.

I like to think about this poem because it is such a good example of what poems can do so well –take us from one condition of being to another. The poem moves and so moves the reader. How good to be moved. How good to be altered so deftly in the still moments of winter.

Hello all,

This is my second letter to the Arts Mid-Hudson community, and I’ve been looking forward to writing you. Since my last post I’ve been busy giving readings and curating them. I had a great time at Bard College talking to graduating creative writing students. I got my B.A. at Bard and it was deeply meaningful to return there after so many years.. (you can see what else I’ve been up to on the Laureate webpage.)

Since I wrote my last post I’ve been musing on something that sticks with me from last month –reading. Not enough is said about reading poetry though lots of people write it and write about writing. But reading. How do we read poetry in a way that retains the true vitality of a poem.? I’d like to address that here.

I like a statement made by the poet Richard Hugo in a book called The Triggering Town. He writes, addressing the nature of poetry, “If you want to communicate use the telephone.” By that he means that a poem does not exist to deliver a message. It’s not, as I put it, a form of intellectual or emotional spinach. It’s not good for you. It’s not bad for you either. It’s neither good nor bad –exactly. A poem is an experience that the poet has constructed for you. Now that is a problematic statement because it suggests that the construction is somehow “intended.” I doubt that is the case. And in any case poems always exceed writers’ intentions, and because of this they bear reading and rereading.

A good example of a poem that constructs an experience is this famous poem by Frank

O’Hara:

The Day Lady Died

BY FRANK O’HARA

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton  

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun  

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets  

in Ghana are doing these days

                            I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)  

doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life  

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine  

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do  

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or  

Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and  

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue  

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and  

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Copyright Credit: Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died” from Lunch Poems. Copyright © 1964 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books. Source: The Collected Poems of Frank O' Hara (1995)

In this poem we are led along by the poet as he travels through a day. Everything in this poem suggests both movement and impediment to movement. The poet gives excruciatingly banal details about his walk through the city. The numbers and the foreign names make the poem a kind of stumble. The persistence of “and” builds an accumulation of feeling and event such that if you read the poem out loud you will find that you will stop breathing at the same moment that O’Hara describes the moment when everyone in the 5 Spot stopped breathing. O’Hara is avoiding the moment of confrontation with Billie Holliday’s death until he can’t avoid it any longer. That’s a physical experience. That bodily experience is what the best poems do for readers.

I don’t for one minute think that O’Hara did anything more than write down what he experienced that actual day. In his famous manifesto “Personism,” O’Hara asserts “sometimes you just have to go on nerve.” Poetry is some nervy business.

When you read a poem give in to experience. Forget poems with direct messages. That’s propaganda. Ugh.

Just “go on nerve.” Have some fun.

Happy holidays everyone. See you in the new year.

Welcome to the Laureate’s Corner!

Hello,

My name is Ruth Danon, and I’m Poet Laureate for Dutchess County and Beacon. For almost a year, I’ve given readings and curated events in libraries, cultural centers, bookstores, and other venues. With this note, I’m inaugurating a new project – a monthly letter in which I will write about the literary arts, poetry, and the life and times of the Poet Laureate.

So, the first question is: What is a Poet Laureate and why does such a role exist? Poets Laureate are appointed at the city, county, state, and national levels. It’s an honor to serve in this role. To my mind, the Laureate is a poet who has two primary functions – one is to present this rich and varied literary art to communities in all sorts of settings, often outside of any academic institution. The second is to advocate for poets and poetry – in this way suggesting that poetry can be vital to personal and community life. I think, particularly at a time in which so much time and human energy is expended (and perhaps wasted) on social media, that poetry can provide an antidote to the loneliness that seems to be epidemic. Beyond that, poetry can provide greater access to the rich inner life that every person can experience if it’s not blocked by too much external noise.

In the last week of October I was invited to read some of my work at the Staatsburg Library. It’s always fun to read my work. I’m a ham from way back. And I love libraries. But the real delight of the experience was the context. It seems that in Staatsburg, for many years (10 I think), some residents of that lovely community gather once a month to share poems on a particular theme. Mind you, these are not poems they have written – these are poems they have scouted out and brought to the group to share and discuss. It’s a reading group. Quite wonderfully, in all the time that the group has been meeting, there has only been one instance of duplication. What a rich compendium they have created. The entire collection is preserved in the library. How wonderful to know that poetry is being read with such attention and pleasure.

The group had asked that I pick the theme. I decided on “Poets, Criminals, and Spies.” And wow, what terrific and varied poems showed up. And what thoughtful and tender conversation ensued.

Also, there were cookies!

So, welcome to the Laureate’s Corner. I’d love to hear from you about your questions, comments, and experiences with poetry.

Til next month,

Ruth