Stingy Kids

Read, Write, Listen

Slate has a rather extensive archive of poems, most of which include audio files of poets reading their works. I couldn't find a history for this archive but it seems to be related (at times) to Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem project (Pinsky is currently Slate's poetry editor and from 1997-2000 held the post of U.S. Poet Laureate). The tagline for the column reads "a weekly poem, read by the author." In a 1997 interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth, Pinsky remarked that "a wonderful aspect of Slate and the poems in Slate that may seem contradictory in relation to that technology versus poetry idea is that you can hear the poems on Slate if you have a sound card in your computer; you can click on the palm and hear the poet read it, so that in a way in Slate the poems are more embodied, are more physical than in a text magazine" ("America's Wordsmith"). But this doesn't explain or define the criterion for the poetry selections. Maybe the poet's were asked to read their own favorite works? I'll ask around.

I miss Robert Hass's Poet's Choice (Washington Post Book World). He did a stupendous job of contextualizing his selections, providing a mini-lecture which included bits of historical background, close reading, and personal musings on the craft. Poet's Choice is where I first encountered Jane Mead, one of my favorite contemporary poets. I loved Hass's assessment of her first book The Lord and the General Din of the World: "There is a mood--connected to solitude that is not loneliness and not despair, but that feels like it could turn into either if you did not try to love the world, or at least look at it attentively. This book seems written from that place." I often returned to this column, which I still mistakingly refer to as "poet's corner," to consult with Hass. I trusted his taste in poetry.

Here are quick links to some of the featured Slate poets and poems, according to my whim and taste (don't they begin to feel like one and the same, fellow poetry lovers?):

* Aimee Nezhukumatathil

* "The Polish Biographical Dictionary in a Library in Houston" by Adam Zagajewski (I'm really am not crazy about his work but he was born in Lvov and I did include C.K. Williams' poem "Bialystock, or Lvov." There seemed to be a corresondance there that makes more sense when you read the Williams' poem.)

* "Bialystock, or Lvov" by C.K. Williams

* Gerald Stern

* "The Traveler" by Louise Glück (see also "Orfeo" and "The Open Grave" to hear the otherwise very private Glück speak)

* "The Turtle" by William Carlos Williams

* "Still Life with Moving Figure" by James Richardson

* "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating" by Wallace Stevens

* "Somewhere Else" by Mark Strand

* Heather McHugh

The Leaf

C.K. Williams writes in Beginnings:

Poetry didn't find me, in the cradle or anywhere near it: I found it. I realized at some point--very late, it's always seemed--that I needed it, that it served a function for me--or someday would--however unclear that function may have been first. I seemed to have started writing poetry before I'd read any. Although why this should have seemed to have been so much of a sin eludes me now, it reinforced the uneasy feeling that I'd had to create the interest in myself rather than having it dawn on me in some splendid conflagration.

This essay (from Williams's Poetry and Consciousness) revived memories of my first poem "The Leaf." I wrote it when I was eight for the "elementary" division of a poetry contest. The poem went like this:

One day while I was walking
I saw a leaf lying on the ground.
I tried to talk to it
but it would only frown.
I asked it what was the matter
and it answered with a groan:
Because I used to be green
and now I am dark brown.

I won the contest and presented the poem to the entire school. But by the time I accepted my award, I had been called on to recite the poem so many times that I had grown numb to its melancholy undercurrent. I also had a little trouble with the uneven rhyme scheme, particularly the "groan" and "brown" slant rhyme. I saw it as the poem's major failure. By the age of nine, I had turned to confessional prose, which consisted mostly of vicious criticism of my family (scribbled on the green pages of my Cabbage Patch Kids diary) and a few short stories, usually sad tales set in lush forests (cf. The Bridge to Terebithia).

I wouldn't write another poem until I was sixteen, when my crush on a certain high school football player inspired reams of impassioned verse. I was reading Emily Dickinson at the time, which only accounted for the poems' proliferous hyphenation. Most of it was of the "oh! bursting fruit!" variety. Nonetheless, after months of private writing, I decided to submit my manuscript to a national poetry competition. A friend of mine patiently read through each poem and made a few diplomatic comments. I remember that she expressly "liked" a poem about an old man who jogged daily through our street, the rest was "interesting." I never told her that the judges had deemed my work a 3.5, which on their scale meant, "little to no promise." "I have no Tribunal," I grumbled. But part of me was also thinking that maybe I was (oh! bitter truth!) a one-hit wonder.

Around that time a classmate approached me to edit his poem. It had ranked high in a competition and was eligible for publication. His letter was almost identical to mine, with the small difference of "promise." I accepted this task (part self-martyrization) and spent a few weeks with him, crafting a rather fine poem in the end. I couldn't have done this without you, he said. This is my fate, I thought, to be Dorothea Brooke to everyone. In the end, it turned out to be a scam (publication upon payment of $75). But by the time I found out that I too had been duped, I had spent a long winter listening to Leonard Cohen and reading Milan Kundera. With no "splendid conflagration," a good poem came out of that depression. It was published in the high school literary journal, Threshold.

Last year, I was reformatting an old computer and stumbled upon my juvenilia in a folder titled "Poems." I read everything again with some tenderness for the sixteen-year old who wrote them. I saved "the old man" to disk to keep "the one after Leonard Cohen" company and deleted the rest.