Mom & Dad

In most cases of picking up a book of poems for the first time, my own experience at least has shown that some of the poems in that book are going to impress, some stir feelings to an unexpected level and a few of them leave me unmoved and perhaps quick to turn the page. More than most other genres, poetry is a dicey realm threaded with quicksand on the one hand and thorny barriers on the other, and while it surely isn’t meant to be that way, some poets have a knack for leading us around the complications and taking us to those unexpected levels. George Bilgere is one of them.

   

George Bilgere has published five collections of poetry. His most recent, The White Museum was awarded the 2009 Autumn House Poetry Prize, while his third book, The Good Kiss won the University of Akron Poetry Award in 2002. Bilgere’s work has garnered numerous other awards, including the Midland Authors Award, a Pushcart Prize and the May Swenson Poetry Award for his 2006 collection Haywire. His work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, the Best American Poetry series and frequently on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac. The poet is a resident of Cleveland, Ohio where he teaches at John Carroll University.

Bilgere has a special genius for shaping eloquent lines from everyday moments that seem small yet resound with near frightening significance. The two poems below are from his third collection, The Good Kiss. Each in turn is a wistful yet tinged with pain memory of parents, reminding us that life is not always a scene from Father Knows Best or Ozzie and Harriet.

LIKE RIDING A BICYCLE

I would like to write a poem
About how my father taught me
To ride a bicycle one soft twilight,
A poem in which he was tired
And I was scared, unable to disbelieve
In gravity and believe in him,
As the fireflies were coming out
And only enough light remained
For one more run, his big hand at the small
Of my back, pulling away like the gantry
At a missile launch, and this time, this time
I wobbled into flight, caught a balance
I would never lose, and pulled away
From him as he eased, laughing, to a stop,
A poem in which I said that even today
As I make some perilous adult launch,
Like pulling away from my wife
Into the fragile new balance of our life
Apart, I can still feel that steadying hand,
Still hear that strong voice telling me
To embrace the sweet fall forward
Into the future’s blue
Equilibrium. But,

Of course, he was drunk that night,
Still wearing his white shirt
And tie from the office, the air around us
Sick with scotch, and the challenge
Was keeping his own balance
As he coaxed his bulk into a trot
Beside me in the hot night, sweat
Soaking his armpits, the eternal flame
Of his cigarette flaring as he gasped
And I fell, again and again, entangled
In my gleaming Schwinn, until
He swore and stomped off
Into the house to continue
Working with my mother
On their own divorce, their balance
Long gone and the hard ground already
Rising up to smite them
While I stayed outside in the dark,
Still falling, until at last I wobbled
Into the frail, upright delight
Of feeling sorry for myself, riding
Alone down the neighborhood’s
Black street like the lonely western hero
I still catch myself in the act
Of performing.

And yet, having said all this,
I must also say that this summer evening
Is very beautiful, and I am older
Than my father ever was
As I coast the Pacific shoreline
On my old bike, the gears clicking
Like years, the wind
Touching me for the first time, it seems,
In a very long time,
With soft urgency all over.

CORNED BEEF AND CABBAGE

I can see her in the kitchen,
Cooking up, for the hundredth time,
A little something from her
Limited Midwestern repertoire.
Cigarette going in the ashtray,
The red wine pulsing in its glass,
A warning light meaning
Everything was simmering
Just below the steel lid
Of her smile, as she boiled
The beef into submission,
Chopped her way
Through the vegetable kingdom
With the broken-handled knife
I use tonight, feeling her
Anger rising from the dark
Chambers of the head
Of cabbage I slice through,
Missing her, wanting
To chew things over
With my mother again.

Drowned Hogs

Thumbing through another of the several Garrison Keillor anthologies of poems on Thursday, nothing much held my attention until I turned the page to discover a poem by New Yorker, Eleanor Lerman. In only a few lines the reader is smack up against moral dilemma, natural disaster, the collapse of cities and finally to that emotion which murmurs closest to the heart, the mystery of love.

Eleanor Lerman is a poet, novelist and short story writer who has always lived in New York. Her first book of poetry, Armed Love (1973), was published when she was twenty-one and nominated for a National Book Award. The New York Times called it X-rated with an implication that young women were not supposed to write books about sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. She tried again two years later with a collection more muted and melancholy titled, Come the Sweet By and By. Once again the experience was less than satisfying and it was twenty-five years before she wrote another book of poems. In 2001 she published The Mystery of Meteors, following that in 2005 with Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, which won for Lerman the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets. She was granted a 2007 Poetry Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2011 received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She published her first novel, Janet Planet last September.

The poem below is from the 2001 collection, The Mystery of Meteors.

WHAT THE DARK-EYED ANGEL KNOWS

A man is begging on his knees in the subway. Six-thirty
in the morning and already we are being presented with
moral choices as we rocket along the old rails, through the
old tunnels between Queens and Manhattan. Soon angels
will come crashing through the ceiling, wailing in the voices
of the castrati: Won't you give this pauper bread or money?
And a monster hurricane is coming: we all heard about it
on the radio at dawn. By nightfall, drowned hogs will be
floating like poisoned soap bubbles on the tributaries
of every Southern river. Children will be orphaned and
the infrastructure of whole cities will be overturned. No one
on the East Coast will be able to make a phone call and we
will be boiling our water for days. And of course there are
the serial killers. And the Crips and the Bloods. And the
arguments about bilingual education. And the fact that all
the clothing made by slave labor overseas is not only the
product of an evil system but maybe worse, never even fits

so why is it that all I can think of (and will think of through
the torrential rains to come and the howling night) is
you, sighing so deeply in the darkness, you and the smell
of you and the windswept curve of your cheek? If this
train ever stops, I will ask that dark-eyed angel, the one
who hasn't spoken yet. He looks like he might know

Full Court Press

Like many other youngsters, a part of my youth was spent on either a football field, baseball diamond or basketball court, and even now when they are very probably long deceased, I am able to recall the names of coaches in both junior and senior high school, am able to remember the excitement and purity of our team play in those years when the euphoria of winning and tears of defeat were so finely balanced, when either one seemed to be the most important thing in our still green lives. There is something so genuine and throat-catching about the play of young athletes, and too often that passion dissipates when it builds to professional sports where everything is “Show me the money!”

Rare to open a collection of poems by a single author and find that as you read from front to back, each successive poem is one that grips from first line to last. Of course, there are many books of poetry that include an impressive number of memorable poems, but for this reader at least, those that hit a homerun, throw a perfect game—those collections are the unexpected find. The winning collection before me now is one called Losing Season by Jack Ridl.

Jack Ridl is the author of eight poetry collections and for thirty-six years taught poetry and literature before his retirement from Hope College in Holland, Michigan. His work has appeared in The Georgia Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Coast, The Denver Quarterly, Chelsea, Free Lunch, The Journal, Passages North, and Poetry East. Ridl lives with his wife along a creek that winds into Lake Michigan.

The American experience of high school sports is the focus of Losing Season, Jack Ridl’s latest collection of poems chronicling a year of hope and defeat on and off the basketball court in a small town. Like a basketball game, the book is divided into four quarters, the poems tracing the season in a cycle that follows the hope, the enthusiasm and disappointment of the team players. At its center is the coach, now in middle age and struggling with the tension between his job, his marriage and the widening gulf between himself and his daughter. The youthful exuberance of daily practices with his high school players serves to remind the fifty-year-old of his own aging.

AT FIFTY

Coach hurls the ball against the garage door,

grabs it on the rebound. He’s missed ten

in a row. He steps to the line, bounces

the ball twice, hard, and the fans from

thirty years ago send their hopes across

their weary lungs. He listens to the hush

of the home crowd while the taunts

of those from out of town float through

the rafters down across the backboard,

spinning around and around the rim.

He slams the ball one more time, feels

the leather, eyes the hoop, shoots.

The ball caroms off the back of the rim, rolls

across the driveway into the herb garden

his wife planted the year they found this house.

Once he could drop nine out of ten

from the line, hit half his jumps shots

from twenty feet. Coach sits down at

the top of the key, stares, sees himself

bringing it up against the press, faking,

shaking his shoulders, stutter stepping, shifting

the ball left hand to right , then back, then up,

his legs exploding, his wrist firing, the ball

looping up, down, through the hoop, making

the net shimmer, the crowd roar. He gets up,

goes over to the garden, reaches for the ball,

stops and pulls some weeds growing through

the oregano, basil, sage, and thyme.

The Crunch is the Thing

In April of last year I remarked in these pages that poet Dorianne Laux has affected me more strongly than any poet I have read in some time. Nine months later that feeling is much the same. Dorianne Laux is a magical poet and continues to be under-appreciated and under-read; she deserves a wider audience. Sunday was a day I decided to reread her latest book of poems published last year, The Book of Men.

As well as this most recent, her work includes Facts About the Moon (2005), Smoke (2000), What We Carry (1994) and Awake (1990). Facts About the Moon was a recipient of the Oregon Book Award and also chosen as a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the collection Awake was nominated for the San Francisco Bay Area Book Critics Award for Poetry. One of Ms Laux’s peers, the poet Tony Hoagland said about her work, “Her poems are those of a grown American woman, one who looks clearly, passionately, and affectionately at rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood, and especially sexual love, in a celebratory fashion.” Laux lives with her husband, poet Joseph Millar in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she teaches in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University. The poem below is from her latest collection, The Book of Men.

Though it does not speak of rites of passage, motherhood, the life of work, sisterhood or sexual love, “A Short History of the Apple” is evidence of the poet’s range.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE APPLE

The crunch is the thing, a certain joy in crashing through

living tissue, a memory of Neanderthal days. — Edward Bunyard, The Anatomy of Dessert, 1929

Teeth at the skin. Anticipation.

Then flesh. Grain on the tongue.

Eve’s knees ground in the dirt

of paradise. Newton watching

gravity happen. The history

of apples in each starry core,

every papery chamber’s bright

bitter seed. Woody stem

an infant tree. William Tell

and his lucky arrow. Orchards

of the Fertile Crescent. Bushels.

Fire blight. Scab and powdery mildew.

Cedar apple rust. The apple endures.

Born of the wild rose, of crab ancestors.

The first pip raised in Kazakhstan.

Snow White with poison on her lips.

The buried blades of Halloween.

Budding and grafting. John Chapman

in his tin pot hat. Oh Westward

Expansion. Apple pie. American

as. Hard cider. Winter banana.

Melt-in-the-mouth made sweet

by hives of Britain’s honeybees:

white man’s flies. O eat. O eat.

For more poems from The Book of Men look here and here and here.

God at a Book Signing

Scott Poole is the author of three books of poetry: The Cheap Seats, Hiding from Salesmen, and most recently, The Sliding Glass Door, released this fall by Colonus Publishing. Poole is the House Poet for Live Wire!, Oregon Public Broadcasting’s weekly radio variety program. From Vancouver, he is currently a software developer by day and poet by night. He says with apparent relief that thankfully, neither occupation requires a nametag, a paper hat or wearing underwear over tights. Earlier this month he had the good fortune of having one of his poems chosen by Garrison Keillor for an edition of The Writer’s Almanac. The poem is from his most recent collection and is called “The Bible.” Oregon’s Poet Laureate, Paulann Petersen said about the poems in The Sliding Glass Door, ‘With an irresistibly zany and vaudevillian energy, these poems begin in an anecdotal mode fully suited to recounting a 2,523 banjo hootenanny or a party at which the host serves 800 scrambled eggs…That mode gains depth and resonance, turning toward the elegiac, the poignantly surreal.’ Most will agree Poole has a killer sense of humor.

THE BIBLE

Just in case.

It’s over there.

Because you have to have at least one.

The part I read the most

is the inscription

to my wife’s grandmother.

I imagine God at a book signing,

signing her copy

“Dear Eva, thanks for worshipping.”

But mainly I consider when

she may have held it in her hands:

a few times at church,

a couple of confused moments in the bedroom, and one strange time after mass

when she walked to the grocery store

and set it for a few seconds

on a stack of apples

while she inspected the bananas for bruises.

Coffee Break

Coffee is something most of us could probably get along well enough without if conditions demanded it. Personally, I hope circumstances never reach that stage because I like coffee in all its forms and brews. Love iced coffee, am especially fond of espresso with thick cream, will always choose coffee ice cream and drink a mug of strong French roast every morning and night. Not normally a fan of Starbucks frappuccinos, this month they have one called Mocha Coconut that knocks my socks off. Coffee in whatever cup, bowl or glass is definitely one of the pleasures of life.

I came across a poem on Monday that put a new slant on the ‘coffee habit’ lifestyle we’ve nursed along to near fetish proportions. Some sly humor in James Tate’s observations of our addiction to the buzz of java. Below is a poem by him on the state of our caffeinated passion.

A NEW LIFESTYLE

People in this town drink too much

coffee. They’re jumpy all the time. You

see them drinking out of their big plastic

mugs while they’re driving. They cut in

front of you, they steal your parking places.

Teenagers in the cemeteries knocking over

tombstones are slurping café au lait.

Recycling men hanging onto their trucks are

sipping espresso. Dogcatchers running down

the street with their nets are savoring

their cups of mocha java. The holdup man

entering a convenience store first pours

himself a nice warm cup of coffee. Down

the funeral parlor driveway a boy on a

skateboard is spilling his. They’re so

serious about their coffee, it’s all they

can think about, nothing else matters.

Everyone’s wide awake but looks incredibly

tired.

Poet, James Tate was born in Kansas City, Missouri. His books of poetry number seventeen, most recent The Ghost Soldiers published in 2008. His collection Selected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and the 1995 book Worshipful Company of Fletchers won the National Book Award. Since 1971 he has been a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. Tate has explained that in writing poetry he plays with phrases clipped from news items, history, anecdotes, or everyday speech, and through a process of assembling, cutting and pasting, ends with a collage of tightly written lines that hopefully reveal unusual insights into the craziness of human nature. “A New Lifestyle” is from his 2001 collection, Memoir of the Hawk.

My Horse Turned Left

Most of the day around here has been a confusion of cords and cables and sub-normal connections. Circuits smoked, signals crossed and wires dead-ended. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that life could really be a case of plug and play? Well, good luck on that. Without my good friend Nobu offering up some expertise I might still be tangled in a hell of connecting cables.

Exhausted at the end of our electronic wrestling match, I flopped into a chair with a highball and reached for the nearest book at hand. Around here you can never be sure what ‘reaching for’ is going to yield, but this time it was Charles Bukowski’s 2007 The People Look Like Flowers At Last: New Poems. Any regular visitor to these pages will already know that Bukowski holds a special place in my heart. His honesty appeals, his bravery inspires. Below are two poems from the 2007 collection.

ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS

all of my knowledge about horse racing
told me that this was a sure bet.
I bet one thousand to win.
the horse had post one
at 6 furlongs.

the bell rang and they came
out of the gate.

my horse turned left
ran through the fence
fell down and
died
right there
at 7/5.

when I tell people this story
they don’t say
anything.

sometimes there’s nothing to say
about
death.

I LIVE IN A NEIGHBORHOOD OF MURDER

the roaches spit out rusted

paper clips

and the helicopter circles and circles

smelling for blood

searchlights leering down into our

bathrooms

searching for our two-lid cache under the

mattress.

5 guys in this court have pistols

another a

machete

we are all murderers and

alcoholics

but there are worse in the hotel

across the street;

they sit in the green and and white doorway

banal and depraved

waiting to be

institutionalized.

here we each have a dying green plant

on our porch

and when we fight with our women at 3 a.m.

we do so

in hushed tones

as outside on each porch

stands a small dish of food

that is always eaten by morning

we presume

by the

cats.