The Elegant Variation

NEW POET LAUREATE

W.S. Merwin has been named Poet Laureate.

"I do like a very quiet life,” Mr. Merwin said by telephone after learning of his appointment. “I can’t keep popping back and forth between here and Washington.” He said he does relish “being part of something much more public and talking too much,” however, and the job of the nation’s premier poet will enable him to do both."

You can learn more about him from his Poets.org page and his Poetry Foundation biography.

ELEGY

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
on an obscure mission through the hallway.

Help me, spirits, to penetrate his dream
and ease his restless passage.

Lay back the darkness for a salesman
who could charm everything but the shadows,

an immigrant who stands on the threshold
of a vast night

without his walker or his cane
and cannot remember what he meant to say,

though his right arm is raised, as if in prophecy,
while his left shakes uselessly in warning.

My father in the night shuffling from room to room
is no longer a father or a husband or a son,

But a boy standing on the edge of a forest
listening to the distant cry of wolves,

to wild dogs,
to primitive wingbeats shuddering in the treetops.

- Edward Hirsch, "Lay Back the Darkness"

(In memoriam, one year later.)

A POEM A DAY ...

I've been paying more attention to poetry these days, something I tend to do when I'm writing as it puts me in touch with language in deeper and more interesting ways.  (I'm currently on an Anne Carson kick thanks to a recommendation from a friend; and I continue to be grateful for FSG's stubborn insistence on continuing to publish all manner of fine poets.)  So I read with great interest Siobahn Phillips's thoughtful post on her daily poetry reading habits:

Like many of you, I would venture, I tend to read poems in different ways. If it’s poetry that I will write about or teach, I read with pen in hand, notes nearby, or laptop humming. But if it’s poetry that I consume without academic purpose, I could be sitting in a chair, outside with my computer, browsing a bookstore, or paging through a journal on a bus. My attention varies in quantity and quality; some weeks I consume more poems, and some days I expend more energy on them—memorizing a stanza, say, rather than nodding and moving on. Sometimes I read everything by one writer in a continuous immersion, like a lover sequestered for a long weekend, and sometimes I read around, like a party guest moving from conversation to conversation.

When I began to consider reading and the everyday, however, I wondered what would happen if my desultory poetry consumption were more conscious. I thought I would try to make my reading habits part of the ordinary repetition I had been studying. After my caffeinated a.m. trawl of email messages and newspaper headlines, I decided, I would take in a regular allotment of just-for-pleasure poems, every morning. I would use some of the many sites that present daily or nearly-daily verse: “Today’s Poem” at the Academy of American Poets, the “Featured Poem” at Poetry magazine, the morning selection at Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, the “new poems” column at thepage.name—plus a site that offers a Shakespeare sonnet each day.

These rounds added maybe twenty minutes to my schedule; they weren’t onerous and didn’t feel drastically altering. But as I settled into the regimen, as I read and meta-read, taking notes and assessing results, I tracked definite shifts in reflection and perception.

You can find out what she discovered here.

JORIE GRAHAM INTERVIEW

As we've said before, we don't know nearly as much about poetry as we'd like, but we do know that Jorie Graham is one of its grand poobahs, so we link to this long and interesting interview in Phillyburbs.com, in which she discusses her newest collection, Sea Change:

DW: What would you suggest to people who are aspiring to be writers and poets? Do you have any advice on how to achieve their goals.

JG: I hate giving advice. But if I take a stab at it today—today I would say: read. Read complete works of poets, to learn what a whole poetic “idiom” is. Also walk, look, smell, taste, touch, listen. Get your body back. Try to make yourself use all your senses every day. There is a vast amount of “information” that is coming at one from sources one doesn’t even know exist. Get outside. Find the strange—not the weird, but the mysterious. We all need to work on staying awake. This is a somnolent era. Growing more so. We need to work hard, pretty much all the time, to achieve moments of presence and wakefulness. Also, avoid living too much in the conceptual intellect at the expense of your body—the “thinky death” Berryman calls it. Undergo poems before you jump to interpretation. Wait till it is absolutely necessary to begin to think “about” the poem, or what it might “mean." Your own or someone else’s.