These Things: The Poets I Sleep Next To
“Knowledge distracts us from our main purpose in life.” - Andrei Tarkovsky
“April, Come She Will,” is National Poetry Month and the cruelest month as T.S. Eliot writes in “The Wasteland,” but what’s so cruel about April, and wait, don’t read that poem. Yet.
Here’s the thing, some people like green beans and some don’t. Even the poet Frank O’Hara writes about poetry in an essay found in his collection of selected poems, “But how can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along?”
So, if you’re po-curious, or think you might like green beans, rather than link to my own poems, or the videopoem I made for Dick Cheney years ago, or the videopoem-meditation on excess and how much is enough, I thought I would simply list the poets I sleep with regularly. This is just to say the collections of poems I found lying on bedside tables and work desks around our place today. Ok? Ok:
Bob Hicok
If you think you like, or might like, contemporary poetry then you’ll love Bob Hicok. No really. Here are the books of his on Jennifer and my bedside tables right now:
Here an excerpt from a poem in “This Clumsy Living”:
Her my body
The dog licks my hand as I worry
about the left nipple
of the woman in the bathroom.
She is drying her hair, the woman
whose left nipple is sore.
We looked this evening
for diagonal cuts
or discoloration
or bite marks from small insects
that may be in our bed.
It is a good bed, a faithful bed.
….
The body of the woman
has many ways to cease
being the body of the woman.
….
I have one way
to be happy
and she is that way.
So good right? This poem reminds me in many ways of Derick Burleson’s “Melt” that I remember hearing him read in a little theater one night in Alaska while he burned a bright white light like a star. I’m forever grateful to Susanna Mishler for introducing me to Bob Hicok and whose own collection “Termination Dust” also sits on the desk next to our bed. If you like poems and meditations on the physicality of the world and our relationship to these, “Termination Dust” is for you.
Li-Young Lee
Lee is a deeply spiritual poet who often uses simple objects and familiar relationships to share possible ways of feeling the world differently. Here’s a poem from his collection titled “Rose”:
Early in the Morning
While the long grain is softening
in the water, gurgling
over a low stove flame, before
the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced
for breakfast, before the birds,
my mother glides an ivory comb
through her hair, heavy
and black as calligrapher’s ink.
….
For half a hundred years she has done this.
My father likes to see it like this.
He says it is kempt.
But I know...
You have to read the ending yourself. I love “Rose,” but my favorite collection of Lee’s is “Behind My Eyes.” Here’s a recording of Lee reading his poem “Immigrant Blues.” Lee has a fantastic voice and I’ve learned so much listening to the way he reads poems.
By the way, if you feel like you don’t a poem, try reading it out loud to yourself. I’ve fallen in love with many poems by this simple act of engaging physically with the poem.
Mary Jo Bang
Mary Jo Bang is another to listen to her reading of poetry--she’s fantastic. Ok, so Bang is an intellectual poet and an acquired taste, but try out her collection “Louise in Love” which follow a handful of characters with a playful and agile intellectual imagination. Think “Amalie” but as a book of poems. Here’s the opening lines of a poem from this collection:
Kiss, Kiss, Said Louise,
By Way of a Pay Phone
To the Other who’d been left behind.
The city was unlucky in cloudy and chance of.
Routing the enemy, following a route.
What does it mean, Mary Louise,
that the mall in Midcreek will open in May?
So good! I love how the first lines of her poems become titles that draw me directly into the poem. She’s another to listen to read her poems. Other collections of hers that I sleep with regularly are:
The Eye Like a Strange Balloon - is an ekphrastic collection where each poem is written to or about a particular work of art, like reading through an art museum. It’s electric!
Elegy - written shortly after the death of her son. This is a chilling collection of poems and highly recommended as she does not pull any punches.
Brenda Hillman
Again, let’s begin with her collection “Loose Sugar” and work our way to the present. So many fantastic poems to connect with here. Here are some lines from “Orion’s Belt”:
Orion lay on his right side,
then on his left, his belt
undone, the three stars
….
the pale sword of the hunter,
the uplifted sandal,
everything else mostly fades
in the folds of heaven–
Yep, it’s totally about sex and the beauty of young love and something about feminism and what a great collection of poems. If you’re really ambitious, try any of her more recent collections as she dives deep into abstractions.
I could go on and on, but which of these poets would I not mention?
James Tate: Selected Poems - Tate is a neo-surrealist who uses fables to make little stories with subtle metaphor. Oh, mostly prose poems (not written in lines but like paragraphs).
Olena Kalytiak Davis: Shattered Sonnets - If you already read contemporary poetry, you have to read this collection.
C.D. Wright: One With Others - are these essays or poems? Does it really matter?
Campbell McGrath: American Noise and/or Pax Atomica
And so many more. Here’s a tip for reading through poetry: when you find a collection you like, go to the publisher’s website and check out who else they publish. Generally, there’s some tone or sensibility among the poets they publish. For example, I almost always love anything Grey Wolf Press publishes in poetry and fiction. When I get jammed, I simply check their list of authors and poets.
Enjoy the green beans.
Writer. Filmmaker. Voice Over. Photographer. Bicyclist.