Paul Muldoon Birthday Reading

What

A poetical celebration of Paul Muldoon’s birth, life and poetry.
When
Wednesday, June 11, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Where
Barnes & Noble Bookseller
3311 Tittabawassee Rd.
Saginaw , MI 48603
phone 989.790.9214
Who should comeJoin us if you love poetry or are curious as to what poetry is all about. Join us if you'd like to talk to people whose hearts and minds are more open than closed. Join us if you can agree or disagree with someone's opinion respectfully. Bring a book if you can. It’s OK if it’s from your library. Note: Paul Muldoon will not be joining our group.
Why
Find out what poems sound like out loud. Listen in on the group and then find a place where you can jump in and read something yourself. Great fun for the whole family. If you have specialized knowledge regarding our poet, do not hesitate to regale us with your story. Don't expect to leave our event with a definitive understanding of the poet or the poems but please do seek to experience and communicate the joys of poetry with others. Join in our informal discussion of poems we know and love and poems we are only just discovering. Better readers make better writers. Visit with our group where everyone's poetry is valued if not appreciated. If you have a smile to share be sure to bring it; otherwise be prepared to leave with one on your face and in your heart. If you're too far away to join us, create your own Birthdays of Poets Reader’s Workshop. Speak up now and forever share your peace. Tell (bring!) a friend.

How to find the organizer(s)We are in the Poetry section, near the window that affords a view of Tittabawassee Road. The staff at Barnes & Noble will put up a sign that says 'This space reserved for The River Junction Poets at 7 p.m.' We'll be getting a few folding chairs to add around the coffee table there.
Details

Paul Muldoon was born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, and educated in Armagh and at the Queen's University of Belfast. From 1973 to 1986 he worked in Belfast as a radio and television producer for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Since 1987 he has lived in the United States. He teaches poetry at Princeton University. ... A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in literature for 1996. ... He has been described in The Times Literary Supplement as "the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War."

From http://www.paulmuldoon.net/biography.php4 accessed 6/10/08.

Paul Muldoon is married to the writer Jean Hanff Korelitz. He has two children - Dorothy and Asher - and lives in Griggstown, New Jersey.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Muldoon accessed 6/10/08.

QUAIL
Forty years in the wilderness
of Antrim and Fermanagh
where the rime would deliquesce
like tamarisk-borne manna
and the small-shot of hail
was de-somethinged. Defrosted.
This is to say nothing of the flocks of quail
now completely exhausted
from having so long entertained an
inordinately soft spot for the hard man
like Redmond O'Hanlon or Roaring Hanna
who delivers himself up only under duress
after forty years in the wilderness
of Antrim and Fermanagh.
From http://www.paulmuldoon.net/index.php4 accessed 6/10/08.

In September 2007, [Muldoon] was hired as poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Muldoon has contributed the librettos for four operas by Daron Hagen: Shining Brow (1992), Vera of Las Vegas (1996), Bandanna (1998), and The Antient Concert (2005). His interests have not only included libretto, but the rock lyric as well, penning lines for the Handsome Family as well as the late Warren Zevon whose titular track "My Ride's Here" belongs to a Muldoon collaboration. Muldoon also writes lyrics for (and plays "rudimentary rhythm" guitar in) his own Princeton-based rock band, Rackett.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Muldoon accessed 6/10/08.
PAUL MULDOON is primarily the lyric writer for RACKETT, though he seems more and more to be getting the hang of a reissue 1952 butterscotch Telecaster.
From http://www.rackett.org/about.html accessed 6/10/08.

Muldoon has written more than ten smaller volumes of poetry, has edited more than ten poetry anthologies and has won nearly ten major literary awards.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Muldoon accessed 6/10/08.

As

by Paul Muldoon

As naught gives way to aught

and oxhide gives way to chain mail

and byrnie gives way to battle-ax

and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead

and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught

and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue)

and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein

and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale

I give way to you.

As bass gives way to baritone

and hammock gives way to hummock

and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack

and bread gives way to reed bed

and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone

and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux

and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine,

and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach

I give way to you.

As vent gives way to Ventry

and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool

and phone gives way to fax

and send gives way to sned

and Dagenham gives way to Coventry

and Covenanter gives way to caribou

and the caribou gives way to the carbine

and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole

I give way to you.

As transhumance gives way to trance

and shaman gives way to Santa

and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack

and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid

and pyx gives way to monstrance

and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew

and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein

and Town and Country Mice to Hanta

I give way to you.

As Hopi gives way to Navaho

and rug gives way to rag

and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax

and Tampa gives way to the water bed

and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho

and crapper gives way to loo

and spruce gives way to pine

and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag

I give way to you.

As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit

and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle

and tick gives way to tack

and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed

and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet

and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw

and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line

and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil”

I give way to you.

As your hummus gives way to your foul madams

and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea”

and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes

and the living give way to the dead

and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams

and Television gives way to U2

and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine

and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee

I give way to you.

As dutch treat gives way to french leave

and spanish fly gives way to Viagra

and slick gives way to slack

and the local fuzz give way to the Feds

and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe

and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View

and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine

Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara

I give way to you.

As cathedral gives way to cavern

and cookie cutter gives way to cookie

and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks

and the shad give way to the smoke shed

and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern

that still rings true

despite that T being missing from its sign

where a little nook gives way to a little nookie

when I give way to you.

That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran

as ling gives way to cod

and cod gives way to kayak

and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med

and catamite gives way to catamaran

and catamaran to aluminum canoe

is symptomatic of a more general decline

whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod

and I give way to you.

For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris

and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró

and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax

and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead,

and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease

and the Greeks give way to you know who

and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9

and nine gives way, as ever, to zero

I give way to you.

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177958 accessed 6/10/08

Brock

by Paul Muldoon

Small wonder

he’s not been sighted all winter;

this old brock’s

been to Normandy and back

through the tunnels and trenches

of his subconscious.

I 1 is father fell victim

to mustard-gas at the Somme;

one of his sons lost a paw

to a gin-trap at Lisbellaw:

another drills

on the Antrim hills’

still-molten lava

in a moth-eaten Balaclava.

An elaborate

system of foxholes and duckboards

leads to the terminal moraine

of an ex-linen baron’s

croquet-lawn

where he’s part-time groundsman.

I would find it somewhat infra dig

to dismiss him simply as a pig

or heed Gerald of Wales’

tall tales

of badgers keeping badger-slaves.

For when he shuffles

across the esker

I glimpse my grandfather’s whiskers

stained with tobacco-pollen.

When he piddles against a bullaun

I know he carries bovine TB

but what I see

is my father in his Sunday suit’s

bespoke lime and lignite,

patrolling his now-diminished estate

and taking stock of this and that.

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177957 accessed 6/10/08.
Expect more at the Birthdays of Poets Blog. Go now.

All best and see you Wednesday,
Andrew Christ
Legal stuff

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Parting Thoughts
Research indicates that better readers make better writers. Maybe this is why, in the Poet's Market, editors of literary magazines often recommend poets read more poetry. Are you not aware? You are a cultural event, and so is everyone else.

Tim Ross

Tonight at our Second Monday Workshop, Tim Ross brought his poem titled Your Eyes Are Changing. Judy brought her poem titled Memorial and I didn't have a poem. It was just us at the workshop tonight. Here is Tim's poem; I will post the revision after he revises it. Meanwhile, if you are reading this and would like to leave a comment as to how this poem might be improved, please do leave your comment here. I'm keeping all the obvious errors in usage & spelling in the poem until the revision. He is also working on a song for which this poem will be the lyrics.

Your Eyes Are Changing

Your eyes are changing they no longer are looking at me.
They don't see what it was, when they use to see.
Your eyes are seeing thing differently.
Your central cortexes is cut off and it no longer visualize me.
Your interaction seems to turn Grey, when I came in to view.
Your eyes are changing they don't act as they did,
may take in but don't putout as they uses to.
Your eyes are interpiting me in a whole new way.
They don't perceive to remain infocus when they glance my way.
Your eyes don't see what there was to be seen.
And know scatter the light into a misty Grey.

Your eyes are changing they don't perceive me as they did,
My lies come out to hunt me as they looked at me instead.
They have no intention to remain around and stay.
Your eyes are changing, they aren't seeing me as they alt to.
They only see that I am just a fool.

Reginald Gibbons

Make Me Hear You

by Reginald Gibbons

When my Aunt Lera — tiny now, slow moving and slow talking — wanted to tell me about her life, she began by saying, "Curtis and me had just one . . . year . . . together." Curdiss (the way she says it) was a genial great man by all remembrances of him, and the two of them, just married, would go fishing in the evening from the banks of the Pearl, the green stream in Mt. Olive, Mississippi. A year of that — quiet aloneness together after supper, things each showed the other, the bed turned down — and then Curtis's father came to live with them in their tiny house and while Curtis was away at work in the mill the old man would find his way out to the yard and have fits, twirling around, falling, so she'd have to pick him up and carry him back inside, and that was how they lived till Curtis died, and then his father. The pain that Lera wouldn't cry of now is like what I'm now the cause of: the things gone in time that you and I held only as sweet memories of towns, walks, rivers, beds, kingdoms, I took away a second time when I killed your hopes — and mine, and mine — for more sweet days to come, and I left that best time locked in the past. Dead Curdiss is Lera's old ghost who's flown with her into every day, the lost chance to live alone with him as he was and could have been, and you're the ghost who'll fly alongside me into the ruins and rooms I decided we would never share again — hovering up just when you see the thing you want to show me, and unable to make me hear you, unable to hear me say back to you, Oh, love, I would never have seen that without you.

Copyright © Reginald Gibbons

This poem was published in the Fall 1983 issue of Ploughshares. It was also included in the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, 1985 (page 215).

It occurs to me now that this poem is exactly the kind of thing I'd like to see more of in poetry. I'm guessing the poet is revealing something of himself in this poem but if he isn't it doesn't take away from the authenticity of the experience I have as a reader of the poem. The people in the poem suffer in understandable ways, and I feel compassion for them even though I myself have not experienced what they have gone through/are going through. The poem features memories of loving relationships, and the speaker of the poem is inflicting pain on him/her self by regretting the decision to end a relationship. I like the emotional honesty though, and I like the suggestion here that relationships don't end they just take on another form. Mr. Gibbons teaches at Northwestern University, and you can see more of him at his Northwestern website.

Two Poems and Vision

Russian nesting dolls are hollow, usually hand-painted figures that fit one inside the other until they all appear to be just one figure. The figures are usually painted so that some of the features appear on all the figures but each figure also has unique features as well. I thought of Russian nesting dolls when I read Robert Graves' poem, "Warning to Children," recently.

Warning to Children
by Robert Graves

Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and pare the rind off:
In the kernel you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel -
Children, leave the string alone!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
With the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
he lives - he then unties the string.

From the Rice University poetry archive accessed 6/5/08.

Then I started to think of what can go on inside something else, and I remembered a poem called "Stone" by Charles Simic who is one of my favorite poets.

STONE

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill--
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

From The Writer's Almanac 7/24/95

Initially I thought these poems have a lot in common including the idea of interesting, unnoticed things inside larger things. They do have that in common. But there is a difference, and it seems to be the tone of voice the speaker has in each poem. In the Graves poem, the speaker is an adult giving, as the title indicates, a warning to children. The speaker is relaxed and speaking with authority. The speaker of the Simic poem could be a child talking to another child, an adult talking to another adult or an exchange between a child and an adult. Whatever the case may be, the speaker is full of wonder and is speaking in a relaxed way that includes imagination and conjecture. While the speaking voice of the Graves poem is speaking with imagination, it is imagination on the leash of "what's good for you." The imagination communicated in the Simic poem is of a free-ranging, speculative nature; that is, the speaker wants to sound like an authority (second stanza) but in the end we are left with the fine conjecturing that begins with "perhaps it is not dark inside after all."

The method Graves uses in writing his "Warning to Children" is apparently didactic: he had the idea for the poem and then used his skills as a writer to execute his vision. The method Simic uses we cannot be certain of but it strikes me as coming from the same sensibility that William Stafford, another favorite poet of mine, which is to sit quietly and take the words as they come instead of trying to compose according to devices conjured up deliberately. Perhaps the method of composition has implications for the "message," if you will, of the poem.

The perspicacious reader will note that it is possible to use both methods at once. Get an idea, then sit quietly and wait for the words to come. Be more concerned for getting it down than for getting it right. Write it, then set it aside until tomorrow or the next day. If it still looks good then, then there could be something there. I've often thought about Stafford's method for revising his poems. Surely he made some revisions.

I think that part of the attraction of the 'sit quietly' method lies in the compounding of method with message. This line of reasoning sees that, in order to benefit from the method, one must set aside one's ego and one's conscious preferences and simply be a vessel if you will of the verse. It is a way of accomplishing something by participating in something larger than oneself. And it is a way to do things without violence or aggression. In that sense, the method is something like Buddhism.

The method of writing didactically runs the risk of producing propaganda and little else. Such poets, when they write for adults, are not remembered well or fondly. When this type of poetry is aimed toward children, however, it can be warmly welcomed and actively appreciated. For example, "Little Orphant Annie" by James Whitcomb Riley: "the Gobble-uns 'll git you/Ef you/Don't/Watch/Out!"

Image from Jeannette's Sketchblog accessed 6/6/08.

Both methods can be useful for those poets who say nothing makes sense to them until they write about it, but it seems to me the didactic sort is more likely to be used by the poet who has a vision of some sort. The 'sit quietly' poet is not one who is charged up about something and wants to express love for something in particular in myriad ways with dozens of poems. Petrarch's vision was Love and his vision was Laura and for him his vision was one in which Love and Laura were one. Petrarch's poems followed a formula which today we call the Petrarchan sonnet. I am calling it a didactic method because the writing is formulaic. I'm not convinced that Petrarch was trying, with his poems, to teach us something.

The notion of a poet of vision is an interesting one I think. It think William Blake was clearly a poet of vision. William Shakespeare, I don't think so. Or, his vision is summed up in the sentence, "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players." William Stafford's vision, perhaps, was one of justice: "Justice will take a million intricate adjustments." I've landed on a large topic here, haven't I. Part of that is due to me as a reader and thinker, and part of that is due to the poets who wrote the poems I've been thinking about.

Then there is a connection in the notion of vision to the importance of perception, especially in such religious practices as Hinduism and Buddhism. And then there's the reverence for the divine which returns us to the importance of attitude and will, and the notion that to pay attention to something is to love it.

Clearly a noticeable difference when the ego is present and assertive and when the ego acknowledges that it is serving something greater than itself.

That's all I've got for now.

Introduction to David Wagoner, his poetry

We will have a few copies of the following when we meet on Wednesday, June 4, 2008 at the Barnes & Noble on Tittabawassee Road in Saginaw, Michigan at 7 p.m. The formatting here is not as you would see in a book of Wagoner's poems. If you have materials you'd like to share please bring them.

This is a Wonderful Poem by David Wagoner

Come at it carefully, don't trust it, that isn't its right name,
It's wearing stolen rags, it's never been washed, its breath
Would look moss-green if it were really breathing,
It won't get out of the way, it stares at you
Out of eyes burnt gray as the sidewalk,
Its skin is overcast with colorless dirt,
It has no distinguishing marks, no I.D. cards,
It wants something of yours but hasn't decided
Whether to ask for it or just take it,
There are no policemen, no friendly neighbors,
No peacekeeping busybodies to yell for, only this
Thing standing between you and the place you were headed,
You have about thirty seconds to get past it, around it,
Or simply to back away and try to forget it,
It won't take no for an answer: try hitting it first
And you'll learn what's trembling in its torn pocket.
Now, what do you want to do about it?

From  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16205 accessed 5/31/08. 

David Wagoner on Adrienne Rich by David Wagoner

Adrienne Rich was the winner of the 1996 Wallace Stevens Award, a $100,000 award given to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. The judges for the 1996 Wallace Stevens Award were Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, Daniel Hoffman, Rosanna Warren, and David Wagoner, who wrote the following citation.

---

The poems of Adrienne Rich since the 1950s have helped lead many other poets in this country through a series of important changes. She has helped them make their way into areas of new growth, has brought them further into the heart of American speech and helped them express a wider range of social, moral, and spiritual concerns. Here, near the end of a productive half century, her poems, both old and new, are providing the same illumination for the latest generation of our poets. At every stage of her development, she has not simply pleased her admirers, but has surprised them. Her ingenuity in structure and diction, the variety and intensity of her forms and voices, and the emotional depth they have enabled her to reach--all the while maintaining an integrity of purpose and an unpredictable originality--have made her lifetime of work a demonstration of what the Tanning Prize [Wallace Stevens Award] was meant to reward: mastery.

From  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15764  accessed 5/30/08. 

For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop by David Wagoner

I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open

Vaguely and gradually go sliding

Shut again, fly up

With a kind of drunken surprise, then wobble

Peacefully together to send him

Home from one school early. Soon his lashes

Flutter in REM sleep. I suppose he's dreaming

What all of us kings and poets and peasants

Have dreamed: of not making the grade,

Of draining the inexhaustible horn cup

Of the cerebral cortex where ganglions

Are ganging up on us with more connections

Than atoms in heaven, but coming up once more

Empty. I see a clear stillness

Settle over his face, a calming of the surface

Of water when the wind dies. Somewhere

Down there, he's taking another course

Whose resonance (let's hope) resembles

The muttered thunder, the gutter bowling, the lightning

Of minor minions of Thor, the groans and gurgling

Of feral lovers and preliterate Mowglis, the songs

Of shamans whistled through bird bones. A worried neighbor

Gives him the elbow, and he shudders

Awake, recollects himself, brings back

His hands from aboriginal outposts,

Takes in new light, reorganizes his shoes,

Stands up in them at the buzzer, barely recalls

His books and notebooks, meets my eyes

And wonders what to say and whether to say it,

Then keeps it to himself as today's lesson.

From http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=30899 accessed 5/31/08. 

Their Bodies

by David Wagoner

To the students of anatomy
at Indiana University

That gaunt old man came first, his hair as white

As your scoured tables. Maybe you’ll recollect him

By the scars of steelmill burns on the backs of his hands,

On the nape of his neck, on his arms and sinewy legs,

And her by the enduring innocence

Of her face, as open to all of you in death

As it would have been in life: she would memorize

Your names and ages and pastimes and hometowns

If she could, but she can’t now, so remember her.

They believed in doctors, listened to their advice,

And followed it faithfully. You should treat them

One last time as they would have treated you.

They had been kind to others all their lives

And believed in being useful. Remember somewhere

Their son is trying hard to believe you’ll learn

As much as possible from them, as he did,

And will do your best to learn politely and truly.

They gave away the gift of those useful bodies

Against his wish. (They had their own ways

Of doing everything, always.) If you’re not certain

Which ones are theirs, be gentle to everybody.

From http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=24503 accessed 5/31/08. 

The Best Slow Dancer

by David Wagoner

Under the sagging clotheslines of crepe paper

By the second string of teachers and wallflowers

In the school gym across the key through the glitter

Of mirrored light three-second rule forever

Suspended you danced with her the best slow dancer

Who stood on tiptoe who almost wasn’t there

In your arms like music she knew lust how to answer

The question mark of your spine your hand in hers

The other touching that place between her shoulders

Trembling your countless feet lightfooted sure

To move as they wished wherever you might stagger

Without her she turned in time she knew where you were

In time she turned her body into yours

As you moved from thigh to secrets to breast yet never

Where you would be for all time never closer

Than your cheek against her temple her ear just under

Your lips that tried all evening long to tell her

You weren’t the worst one not the boy whose mother

Had taught him to count to murmur over and over

One slide two slide three slide now no longer

The one in the hallway after class the scuffler

The double clubfoot gawker the mouth breather

With the wrong haircut who would never kiss her

But see her dancing off with someone or other

Older more clever smoother dreamier

Not waving a sister somebody else’s partner

Lover while you went floating home through the air

To lie down lighter than air in a moonlit shimmer

Alone to whisper yourself to sleep remember.

From http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=179263 accessed 5/31/08. 

The Good Night and Good Morning of Federico Garcia Lorca

by David Wagoner

He knew he was asleep and was dreaming

Of a beautiful poem. It seemed to be singing

Itself in the night, and he woke

In a bed in a room in an old hotel

And lay there, hearing the song go on

Though he could see the shape

Of his empty shirt on the straight chair

And his empty shoes on the patch of carpet

Made light, half by the moon

And half by the gray beginning

Of dawn. He could see the silhouette

Of his own hand against the window shade

Like a flower, open and waiting. He smiled

At the foolishness of loving his own poem

In his own dream, of accepting praise

From his own shadow. But his mind's eye

Kept seeing that poem and his real ear

Kept hearing that same song. It came from the street

Under his window, and before he knew why,

He was out of bed and shivering his way

Into what were some of his clothes

And one of his shoes and stumbling

Into the hall and down the unlighted stairs

And through the lobby (where the clerk was dreaming

Something else), through the stubbornly locked door

And along the sidewalk to the curb where the singer

Was sweeping trash and leaves along the gutter

With his slow broom, who now stopped, his mouth

Open to gape at an apparition

Holding a scrap of paper up to his face

And begging him to read aloud. The sweeper whispered

He couldn't read. And Lorca took him

Into his arms and kissed him and kissed

The morning air, now stirring what was left

Of the leaves overhead, and went limping back

Through a door that stood wide open

And a grand lobby and up the stairs into bed

To lie there stark awake as sleeplessly

As a poet who'd been told he was immortal.

From http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=30544 accessed 5/31/08.

David Wagoner (1926 - )

Though David Wagoner's work is not widely anthologized nor has he been awarded the celebrity status of many of his literary contemporaries, he has won numerous prestigious literary awards, and enjoys an excellent reputation both as a writer and as a teacher of writing. Wagoner was selected to serve as chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 1978 and was the editor of Poetry Northwest, until its last issue in 2002.

Born in Ohio and raised in Indiana, Midwesterner Wagoner has been initially influenced by family ties, ethnic neighborhoods, industrial production and pollution, and the urban environment. His move to the Pacific Northwest in 1954, the result of his teacher and friend Theodore Roethke's recommending he apply for a teaching position at the University of Washington, changed both his outlook and his poetry. Writing in the Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Wagoner
recalls how "when I drove down out of the Cascades and saw the region that was to become my home territory for the next thirty years, my extreme uneasiness turned into awe. I had never seen or imagined such greenness, such a promise of healing growth. Everything I saw appeared to be living ancestral forms of the dead earth where I'd tried to grow up." So it is that thematically, David Wagoner's poems often mourn, as Robert Cording notes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "the loss of the ordinary fertile and life-giving aspects of the world," though David K. Robinson, writing in Contemporary Poetry, adds the themes of "survival, anger at those who violate the natural world" and "a Chaucerian delight in human oddity." Cording also notes several distinctive traits of Wagoner's poetry: a "clarity of descriptive detail," and a "wonderful feel for the metaphorical implications of ordinary situations," both of which justify Paul Breslin's pronouncement in the New York Times Book Review that David Wagoner is "predominantly a nature poet . . . as Frost and Roethke were nature poets." Wagoner's early poetry is logically compared to that of his one-time teacher Theodore Roethke, though Robert Cording also compares him to Robert Frost for his "speaking about our largest concerns," among them "how we go about 'finding the right direction' in 'broken country' so that we may, in time, with luck, arrive with a full and earned
understanding of this 'worn-down, hard, incredible sight / Called Here and Now,' an understanding that involves the acceptance that our lives are what we make of them."
Excerpted from http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7134 accessed 5/31/08


Beginning with Dry Sun, Dry Wind comprised of twenty-two short lyrics and eight dramatic monologues, Wagoner's poems, notes Cording, operate from a basic structure: "a series of natural observations that suggest the imperfection of the world in which we live followed by a more direct linking to the speaker's predicament and estrangement." In this first book, the poet notes how "Eyes are tossed like sandbars / Along whatever crossway the wind takes, / Buried at random with the tree, with love, / With last year's certain light." Wagoner's second book, A Place to Stand, echoes Roethke's influence in its use of journey poems as the poet quests "backward to his own beginnings," observes Cording.

The Nesting Ground reflects Wagoner's relocation physically, aesthetically and emotionally; in these poems, Cording remarks, Wagoner has "abandoned the arid landscapes of the Midwest for the teeming life of the Pacific Northwest; and he has moved from lamentation and complaint to his more typical stance of cataloguing the world around him." The poem "Guide to Dungeness Spit," in which Wagoner notes how "Those whistling overhead are Canada geese; / Some on the waves are loons, / And more on the sand are pipers," offers "a kind of prototype for Wagoner's best poems, which are written as a series of instructions for survival in life," states Cording. James K. Robinson calls the title poem from Staying Alive "one of the best American poems since World War II," offering readers "a profoundly sensible set of instructions to one lost in the woods and valuable to anyone anywhere who is interested in staying alive." In poems like "The Words," Wagoner discovers harmony with nature by learning to be open to all it has to offer: "I take what is: / The light beats on the stones, / the wind over water shines / Like long grass through the trees, / As I set loose, like birds / in a landscape, the old words." Robert Cording, who calls Staying Alive
"the volume where Wagoner comes into his own as a poet," believes that for Wagoner, taking what is involves "an acceptance of our fragmented selves, which through love we are always trying to patch together; an acceptance of our own darkness; and an acceptance of the world around us with which we must reacquaint ourselves."
Collected Poems 1956-1976 was praised by X. J. Kennedy in Parnassus for offering "readable" poems which are "beautifully clear; not merely comprehensible, but clear in the sense that their contents are quickly visible." Yet it was Who Shall Be the Sun?, based upon Native American myth and legend, which gained critical attention. Hayden Carruth, writing in Harper's Magazine, called the book "a remarkable achievement," not only for its presentation of "the literalness of shamanistic mysticism" but also for "its true feeling." Hudson Review's James Finn Cotter notes how Wagoner "Has not written translations but condensed versions that avoid stereotyped language. . . . The voice is Wagoner's own, personal, familiar, concerned. He has achieved a remarkable fusion of nature, legend and psyche in these poems."

In Broken Country shows Wagoner honing the instructional backpacking poems he had first used in Staying Alive, and the twelve poem sequence that concludes In Broken Country "can stand with Wagoner's finest poems" notes Robert Cording, and Leonard Neufeldt, writing in New England Review, calls "the love lyrics" included in the first section to be "among the finest since Williams' 'Asphodel.'" Wagoner's Landfall was slighted by Paul Breslin for using "well-worn pastoral conventions" in its nature poems and showing limitations when he "turns form nature to people" as his poetic subjects. First Light, Wagoner's "most intense" collection, according to James K. Robinson, reflects Wagoner's third marriage to poet Robin Seyfried, echoed in the poem "Loon Mating" in which he recounts "the haunting uprisen mating call, / And again, and now the beautiful sane laughter." Publishers Weekly celebrated Walt Whitman Bathing for its use of "plainspoken formal virtuosity" which allows for "a pragmatic clarity of perception," as in Wagoner's description of his parents during his Midwest childhood: "They stand by the empty car, / By the open driver's door, / Waiting. The evening sun / is glowing like pig-iron."
Excerpted from http://poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7134 accessed 5/31/08.