Poetry Friday - The Love of Stationery Goods

If you want a Halloween poem, click here for a Google Books look at an early edition of Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti (especially that horrible moment when the goblins are all over Lizzie, trying to mash ripe fruit into her mouth - yikes!) The painting to the right is from the edition illustrated by Arthur Rackham.





Meanwhile, here's a poem from me to all you stationery supply addicts:


PENCIL BOX

I put four bits on the counter
and the box was mine.
Six yellow pencils fit there
side by side, I was perfectly addled,
I was a goner – even before I knew
the alphabet, I knew its cedar perfume –
I flew over the high-humped bridge
painted on the top, over the willow,
the m-stroke for a bird, everything
was suggestion then, before
the putting on of too fine a point.
People expected me to come
to my senses, save the change
in my burning pockets, after all
the box was wooden, cheap
Chinatown, but half a dollar
went a long way toward heaven
when heaven was closer.

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It's always been my theory that you could predict who was going to be a writer by the way he or she behaved in stationary stores when young. An early love of pencils, pens, erasers, rulers, graph paper, tracing paper, architectural supplies, index cards, blank books, ledgers.....a love of those is a good predictor, for some reason, of a later love of words.

The poem was first published in The Threepenny Review. If you subscribe to just one literary journal, that's the one you should subscribe to - the editor is Wendy Lesser (who wrote the fascinating Pictures at an Execution and edited The Genius of Language: Fifteen Writers Reflect on Their Mother Tongue) and she fills every issue to the brim with wonderful essays, poems, stories, reviews and art (often photography). TTR is stimulating and intelligent, and it never disappoints. Think about giving a subscription to someone (even yourself!) as a gift.


To see the round-up this week for Poetry Friday, go to Sylvia Vardell's wonderful blog, Poetry for Children.

M.T. Anderson's Scariest Line???

REMINDER:

Don't miss the prize to be won over at Through the Tollbooth. Tami Brown posted it as part of a great interview of M.T. Anderson (and all you have to do to enter is pick the scariest line from one of his books!)

Poetry Friday: Giving Metal a Tongue

Here's a "small poem" by Valerie Worth (1933-1994) from her collection, All the Small Poems and 14 More. Some of those small poems I like - short meditations - some not as much (that's true for any collection, from Basho to Auden) - but this one particular poem - titled simply bell - is nearly perfect, in terms of the way it falls on the ear first, then comes in through the heart and mind, and the way it serves as a metaphor for what we do as writers - giving metal a tongue.

bell

By flat tink
Of tin, or thin
Copper tong
Brass clang
Bronze bong
The bell gives
Metal a tongue
To sing
In one sound
Its whole song.

Poetry Friday this week is hosted by Kelly Herold at Big A little a.

Poetry Friday: Les Murray, Playful Genius

In honor of Poetry Friday, I'm posting a poem by the Australian poet, Les Murray. I don't think there's anyone who surpasses him right now for rigorous play with sound. He uses form but makes it feel natural and smooth as silk. And the following poem simply has to be heard to be believed (and appreciated) so it's lucky that there is an audio link (click on the symbol at the end of the poem) at Les Murry's home page.

One of the things I try to teach my students is that you can't get very far with a poem if the subject has been done to death - fresh and new is a better place to start. Well, what bats say in "Bat English" is what I would call Fresh and New.

By the way: It's Les Murray's birthday today. Here's wishing him many happy returns of the day.


Bat's Ultrasound

Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.

Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:

ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.


from
Selected Poems, 1986
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Poetry Friday this week is being hosted by Becky over at Becky's Book Reviews

M. T. Anderson, Under Armed Guard

One of the best author photos EVER, bar none. This is M.T. Anderson on the Boston Common with two Revolutionary War re-enacters. Obviously. I think. Or maybe that's friend John Green on one side and friend Tim Wynne-Jones on the other? I wouldn't put it past them. But it's the serious look on Tobin's face that makes it perfect.

The photo appeared in this week's Publisher's Weekly, alongside an interview in which Tobin talks about many things, including those adults who said that Octavian Nothing used vocabulary above a teenager's ability level. Tobin talks about sci-fi where there is a lot of language-building going on next to world-building, and he concludes, "I think kids are excited by language, and they’re not always given credit for that."

Hooray! Well-said. And as far as I'm concerned, I wish some of our leaders would be as honest as Tobin is when he says, about the lessons learned in his research for Octavian, "I think there was also a slow, grinding realization for me of what it is that human beings are willing to do to each other to secure their own luxuries. That was a very sad tutorial I went through, working on this book. There was suffering on an unimaginable scale. I know this is a bit dismal for an interview, but I honestly feel like a full recognition of the capacity of mankind to ignore each other’s suffering is one of the saddest lessons I learned."

I'm all for Hope, I'm all for Change, but first, let's learn the lessons we need to learn, and let's tell the truth about our history, instead of just waving a flag and calling ourselves great. Then , once we've done that, we can turn to optimism and The Dream, if it calls us.