Poems to Pictures

In honor of National Poetry Month, I hosted a poetry workshop entitled Poems to Pictures. Author and poet Ruth Baja Williams read the poems she'd set to a series of watercolors by artist Jane Andrle Gillette, photos of which we're projected for viewing.  Workshop participants then chose from a selection of magazine and postcard pictures set out on a table, and crafted their own poem to picture. The results were stunning. In just 30 minutes, drafts were completed, read aloud, and appreciated. My favorite is Remember the Lake, by George Mason University creative writing student Benjamin Renne.  He chose a magazine photo of Morning, Lake George, an 1871 oil on canvas by A T Bricher.

Morning, Lake George. Oil on canvas by A T Bricher 1871

Remember the Lake
By Benjamin Renne

Remember the lake
That swollen Autumn morning
When you and me and Jack went
Out for a row. We brought
The tackle box and the rods and
A paper bag full of fried egg sandwiches.

Remember the rocks
In the middle of the silent
Pond, frost covered and slick. They
Were the giants and the sirens,
Enticing fantasies and chimeras which
Even brave Ulysses can’t avoid.

Remember the shoreline,
How it seemed so far away
When we were alone, the three
Of us in the middle of the peaceful lake.
The pebble beach, littered with goose
Shit, was far away. So far.

Remember the trees,
Bare of life and slanted
Like an old man with a broken
Back. The birds, which used to
Call those dead trees home, would
Sing to us on that frosty morning.

Remember the sky
And the mountains gray,
Fading into the background, where the
Fog blends everything together
So that the future is masked
With the low clouds, fuzzy and unpredictable.

Remember the car,
The smell of fish
Which permeated the leather seats,
And Jack complained the whole way back.
My boots were wet and stunk still
Of the lake, but I smiled.
Remember the lake?

Other posts on poetry:
April is National Poetry Month
Franz Schubert and Friedrich Rückert: Poetry and Music
Late Wife
When Writing a Poem
MLB, Opening Day

April is National Poetry Month

I'm trying to understand what it is about poetry that excites me. Each year I make a big deal of National Poetry Month at whichever library I happen to be working. Yet, there are many poems that I do not understand. So what is it about poetry that I like?

I began thinking about this as I planned blog posts, tweets, displays and programs for National Poetry Month 2011. When I read the poems that I consider favorites, I see that it's the art of the words that I love. In poetry, words are carefully chosen and strategically arranged to produce a sight, a sound, a smell, a feel, a memory. Following are examples, a few of my favorite poetic lines.

"...sensing only the pale humidity
of the night and the slight zephyrs
that stir the tops of the trees"

from Night Letter to the Reader by Billy Collins.

"Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro' the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot."
from The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Lord Tennyson

"He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake."
from Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Recently someone suggested to me that the written word is an impersonal form of communication compared with face-to-face conversation. I see it differently. I'm a writer and a reader, and words are the most intimate, most lovely, most heartfelt form of communication. This is what I like about poetry: The precisely chosen beautiful words and the pictures they paint.

Robert Frost: The Derry Years

In March 2010, I was in Middlebury, Vermont, when I was reacquainted with the poet Robert Frost. I’d long been fond of his poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Now I learned that Mr. Frost had spent time in a cabin northwest of Middlebury, and that he had taught at Middlebury College. My interest was piqued.

In The Vermont Bookshop, I looked for a biography and found Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini. Parini is a poet, novelist, and biographer serving as Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College.

For the last year I’ve been savoring the biography, and I took it with me to New Hampshire when I learned that Frost’s farm in Derry was only;12 miles south of the Manchester airport.

Frost’s ten years on the farm in Derry (1901 – 1911) were key in his life as a poet. It was during this time that he developed his own voice. While working with and talking to his New Hampshire neighbors, Frost realized a connection between poetry and conversation. “I was after poetry that talked,” wrote Frost. If my poems were talking poems – if to read one of them you heard a voice – that would be to my liking,” he said (page 88).

Parini writes that, “By the time he [Frost] emerged at the end of this decade of farming, writing, and teaching, he would be fully formed; a major modern poet,” (page 73).

Today the Robert Frost Farm is directly off State Highway 28. I turned left into the muddy driveway, the white farmhouse and barn on my right surrounded by piles of snow. Behind the buildings and yard is a large field, bordered on three sides by pine and birch trees. A couple with baby in a backpack made their way on snowshoes across the field toward the back tree line.

For me, there is a mix of magic and romance in being in the place where someone I know through their writing or art once lived. There is an imagining of the reality of what I’ve read actually occurring in this location. It makes the person more real to me. It makes history live.

I walked the muddy driveway and along the shoulder of Highway 28. The snow was too deep for me to get any closer, or to walk all the way around the house; I did not have snowshoes. The house was closed for the season.

During his Derry years, Robert Frost taught at the Pinkerton Academy, two miles north of his farm, in order to earn extra income. He was a highly regarded teacher by students and colleagues, and was even asked to speak about his teaching philosophy. Parini says Frost focused his talk, “on the need for teachers to develop their own minds before they thought about developing the minds of their students. He [Frost] also said it was important that students be made to feel so dependent on books that without them, ever afterward, they would feel lonely,” (page 99).

I went away knowing more of Robert Frost, inspired to read again Parini’s book, and dedicated to memorizing another Frost poem.

When Writing a Poem

Today while writing about W. S. Merwin, the newly announced 17th Poet Laureate of the United States, I discovered a poetry treasure on the Library of Congress' Website.  Poet Charles Simic shares "A few things to keep in mind while sitting down to write a poem."  His seven guidelines are simple, yet profound.  I know some of us like to try our hand at writing poetry, and that students are given poetry writing assignments.  Simic's list is an inspirational aid.

(Photo:  Lydia and me in the stacks at the Library of Congress, February 2010.)

I Am The Book

I'll be your friend, stay by your side, contradict you, make you laugh or teary-eyed
On a sun-summer morning.

I'll spark you, help you sleep, bring dreams you'll forever keep
On a dappled-autumn afternoon.

I'll warm you, keep you kindled, dazzle you till storms have dwindled
On a snow-flaked winter evening.

I'll plant in you a spring-seedling with bursting life while you are reading.

 I am the book you are needing.

Poem by Tom Robert Shields
Selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins for the book Wonderful Words

MLB, Opening Day

A baseball poem from the poetry collection for children called Sports! Sports! Sports!, selected by Lee Bennett Hopkins.

Fly Balls

I am like a spider,
So it's fly balls that I love.
For I catch them when they're buzzing,
In the webbing of my glove.

Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

by A. E. Housman.  Photo by Susan Ujka Larson

Coming Soon - Poetry Month!

Begun in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month is celebrated each year in April. I know it is yet a few weeks away, but I could not resist and today began compiling a list of poetry resources. These are some of my favorite poetry Web sites.

Poets.org
Library of Congress: Poetry
Poetry Foundation
Favorite Poem Project
Poetry 180
Scholastic Celebrates National Poetry Month

Do you have any to add?

Albert Goldbarth and His Shawl

Driving home this evening, I heard poet Albert Goldbarth read his poem Shawl on The NewsHour.   Goldbarth is the only poet to twice win the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry.  He won it in 1991 for his collection Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, and in 2001 for Saving Lives.  Of his 25 books of poetry published to date, To Be Read in 500 Years is his most recent, published in 2009.  Goldbarth is also the winner of the 2008 Mark Twain Poetry Award from the Poetry Foundation.  Goldbarth does not own a computer.  He writes longhand in spiral bound notebooks with inexpensive pens.  When he feels a poem is complete, he types it. In his interview on The NewsHour, Goldbarth said, "It feels to me as if I were born to write, that that's why I was put on Earth, and I've been trying to be the best poet I know how to be."  I was so taken with Goldbarth and his poem Shawl that when I arrived home I immdeiately sat down to share them here.

'Shawl'

Eight hours by bus, and night
was on them. He could see himself now
in the window, see his head there with the country
running through it like a long thought made of steel and wheat.
Darkness outside; darkness in the bus -- as if the sea
were dark and the belly of the whale were dark to match it.
He was twenty: of course his eyes returned, repeatedly,
to the knee of the woman two rows up: positioned so
occasional headlights struck it into life.
But more reliable was the book; he was discovering himself
to be among the tribe that reads. Now his, the only
overhead turned on. Now nothing else existed:
only him, and the book, and the light thrown over his shoulders
as luxuriously as a cashmere shawl.