Knopf Doubleday » Poem-a-Day

Talking with Lucille Clifton

amyers — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:51:03 +0000

Poetry in Person, edited by Alexander Neubauer, is a rich book of conversations between Pearl London, the legendary New School teacher, and the many important American poets she brought into her classroom to share their poems in progress. Lucille Clifton, who passed away in February of this year, visited London’s classroom on May 3, 1983. She spoke about her childhood and beginnings as a poet, about the personal and political dimensions of being a black woman poet (she references Gwendolyn Brooks’s remark “Whenever I walk down the street it’s a political statement”), and shared drafts of her work with London and her students.

Click here to hear Clifton on being an extraordinary ordinary woman.
Audio

And here to hear her read her poem “the thirty eighth year.”
Audio

Beautiful Verses for the Poetry Lover

pcortland — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 22:38:11 +0000

Give the poetry lover in your life the gift of verse. Presenting: our holiday checklist.

Read Poems and a Story by John Updike

pcortland — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:31:23 +0000

John Updike (1932-2009) remained loyal to the art of poetry throughout his career as a brilliant and popular practitioner of the short story and the novel, and as perhaps the most generous and eminent literary critic of our time. In keeping with Updike’s almost magical ability to greet the typewriter with a joyous sense of purpose every working day, he ended his life writing: his final collection of poems, Endpoint contains some poems written during the last days of his illness, in a spirit of gratitude and clear-eyed summation. The volume includes a characteristically Updikean mixture of serious and light verse, of sonnets and contemporary songs, as he opens the rich store of his inner self once more for our perusal and understanding.

Half Moon, Small Cloud

Caught out in daylight, a rabbit’s
transparent pallor, the moon
is paired with a cloud of equal weight:
the heavenly congruence startles.

For what is the moon, that it haunts us,
this impudent companion immigrated
from the system’s less fortunate margins,
the realm of dust collected in orbs?

We grow up as children with it, a nursemaid
of a bonneted sort, round-faced and kind,
not burning too close like parents, or too far
to spare even a glance, like movie stars.

No star but in the zodiac of stars,
a stranger there, too big, it begs for love
(the man in it) and yet is diaphanous,
its thereness as mysterious as ours.

(Listen to a tribute reading of the poem by the New York Times writer-at-large Charles McGrath, a friend of John Updike’s who is also the reader on the audio edition of Endpoint.)
Audio

Here are two “fourteeners” written by John Updike. This pair comes at the end of the autobiographical title sequence around which Endpoint is built.

Creeper

With what stoic delicacy does
Virginia creeper let go:
the feeblest tug brings down
a sheaf of leaves kite-high,
as if to say, To live is good
but not to live—to be pulled down
with scarce a ripping sound,
still flourishing, still
stretching toward the sun—
is good also, all photosynthesis
abandoned, quite quits. Next spring
the hairy rootlets left unpulled
snake out a leafy afterlife
up that same smooth-barked oak.

Fine Point (12/22/08)

Why go to Sunday school, though surlily,
and not believe a bit of what was taught?
The desert shepherds in their scratchy robes
undoubtedly existed, and Israel’s defeats—
the Temple in its sacredness destroyed
by Babylon and Rome. Yet Jews kept faith
and passed the prayers, the crabbed rites,
from table to table as Christians mocked.

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

More about Endpoint.

John Updike’s first collection of new short fiction since the year 2000, My Father’s Tears finds the author in a valedictory mood as he mingles narratives of his native Pennsylvania with stories of New England suburbia and of foreign travel.

“Personal Archaeology” considers life as a sequence of half-buried layers, and “The Full Glass” distills a lifetime’s happiness into one brimming moment of an old man’s bedtime routine. High-school class reunions, in “The Walk with Elizanne” and “The Road Home,” restore their hero to youth’s commonwealth where, as the narrator of the title story confides, “the self I value is stored, however infrequently I check on its condition.” Exotic locales encountered in the journeys of adulthood include Morocco, Florida, Spain, Italy, and India. The territory of childhood, with its fundamental, formative mysteries, is explored in “The Guardians,” “The Laughter of the Gods,” and “Kinderszenen.” Love’s fumblings among the bourgeoisie yield the tart comedy of “Free,” “Delicate Wives,” “The Apparition,” and “Outage.”

In sum, American experience from the Depression to the aftermath of 9/11 finds reflection in these glittering pieces of observation, remembrance, and imagination.

Read an excerpt from “Morocco,” one of the short stories in the collection.

May 1: Written Late at Night by Janusz Szuber

snash — Fri, 01 May 2009 05:00:50 +0000

Au revoir from the Knopf poetry team. We hope to see you next April. For now, a few things to watch for in the coming months:

* A Monster’s Notes, a remarkable fiction in the voice of Mary Shelley’s “monster,” written by poet Laurie Sheck; in which the monster, who originally met Mary as a young girl at the grave of her mother, observes the Shelley family at close range, struggles to come to terms with his role as Victor Frankenstein’s creation in Mary’s work, and travels far and wide, taking notes on the behaviors and artistic inventions of the strange race of humans he cannot quite join, but begins to understand…

* Paperback editions of Franz Wright’s Earlier Poems and W. S. Di Piero’s Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems

* They Carry a Promise, the first collection in English of the poems of the Polish master Janusz Szuber, who here ponders the duties of his craft:

Written Late at Night

Almost all day I sat at the table
And, swapping two pens, wrote letters.
One of them, as a joke, was in gothic script.
I tried to be honest, avoid untruth
As far as the truth about myself and events
In their general contour was accessible to me.
Then a few longer phone conversations
And a short break to read eight poems by Cavafy.
How great! Superb! Who can write like that about desire and love,
Admitting that when they burn out
And the bitter tasting of the body is taken away,
They guide the poet’s hand. In them and only in them
All future incantations.

(Translation by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough)

More about They Carry a Promise

About Janusz Szuber

Excerpt from THEY CARRY A PROMISE. Translation copyright © 2009 by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

April 30: Creeper and Fine Point by John Updike

snash — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 05:00:01 +0000

Knopf’s poetry month closes with the last two “fourteeners” written by John Updike. This pair comes at the end of the autobiographical title sequence around which Endpoint, his final collection, is built. We also offer a link to a bonus poem from Updike’s Collected Poems, the wonderful “Seagulls,” written in 1959, and one of Updike’s own favorites among his poems, along with audio of his recording of it, from our archives.

Our thanks to you for reading and listening with us throughout the month.

Creeper

With what stoic delicacy does
Virginia creeper let go:
the feeblest tug brings down
a sheaf of leaves kite-high,
as if to say, To live is good
but not to live—to be pulled down
with scarce a ripping sound,
still flourishing, still
stretching toward the sun—
is good also, all photosynthesis
abandoned, quite quits. Next spring
the hairy rootlets left unpulled
snake out a leafy afterlife
up that same smooth-barked oak.

Fine Point (12/22/08)

We mocked, but took. The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely—magnificent, that “surely”—
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever.

Listen to a recording of “Seagulls” and read the poem below.

Audio

Seagulls

A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes—
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes too many
to make them very well.

Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.

At that hour on the beach
when flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.

It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them,
but which neither quite knows—
walk capricious paths through scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.

April 29: The Mistake by Jack Gilbert

snash — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 05:00:30 +0000

Jack Gilbert, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for his last book, Refusing Heaven, is now in his mid-eighties, still celebrating and sorrowing to the fullest. He has returned with an elegiac collection in which he reconsiders, as the figure of Ovid says in one of the poems, “White stone in the sunlight…Both the melody / and the symphony. The imperfect dancing / in the beautiful dance. The dance most of all.”

The Mistake

There is always the harrowing by mortality,
the strafing by age, he thinks. Always defeats.
Sorrows come like epidemics. But we are alive
in the difficult way adults want to be alive.
It is worth having the heart broken,
a blessing to hurt for eighteen years
because a woman is dead. He thinks of long
before that, the summer he was with Gianna
and her sister in Apulia. Having outwitted
the General, their father, and driven south
to the estate of the Contessa. Like an opera.
The fiefdom stretching away to the horizon.
Houses of the peasants burrowed into the walls
of the compound. A butler with white gloves
serving chicken in aspic. The pretty maid
in her uniform bringing his breakfast each
morning on a silver tray: toast both light
and dark, hot chocolate and tea both. A world
like Tosca. A feudal world crushed under
the weight of passion without feeling.
Gianna’s virgin body helplessly in love.
The young man wild with romance and appetite.
Wondering whether he would ruin her by mistake.

Listen to a 1991 recording of Jack Gilbert reading his poem “Meanwhile”

Audio

More about The Dance Most of All

More about Refusing Heaven

About Jack Gilbert

April 28: Some Different Kinda Books by Sapphire

snash — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 05:00:07 +0000

A poem from the 1999 volume Black Wings & Blind Angels, by Sapphire, who is also a novelist. (Her novel Push has recently been made as a movie entitled “Precious,” a winner at Sundance which will be released in November.)

Some Different Kinda Books

I

She asks why we always
read books about black people.
(I spare her the news she is black.)
She wants something different.
Her own book is written in pencil.
She painstakingly goes back & corrects
the misspelled words.
We write each day.
Each day the words look like
a retarded hand from Mars
wrote them.
Each day she asks me how
do you spell: didn’t, tomorrow, done
husband, son, learning, went, gone . . .
I can’t think of all the words she can’t spell.
It’s easier to think of what she can spell:
MY NAME IS CARMEN LOPEZ.
I am sorry I was out teacher.
My husband was sick.
You know I never miss school.
In that other program
I wasn’t learning nothing.
Here, I’m learning so I come.
What’s wrong with my husband?
I don’t know. He’s in the hospital. He’s real sick
I was almost out the room
when I hear the nurse ask him,
Do you do drugs?
He say yes.
I say what!
I don’t know nuthin’ ’bout no drugs.
I’m going off in the hospital.
He’s sick.
I’m mad.
Nobody tells you nuthin’!
I didn’t hear that nurse
I wouldn’t know
nuthin’.
Huh?
Condoms? No, teacher.
He’s my husband.
I never been with another man.

II

I think he got AIDS
he still don’t tell me.
I did teacher. I tried
to read the chart at the hospital
but I couldn’t figure out those words.
Doctor don’t say, he say privacy.
The nurse tell me.
She’s Puerto Rican. She say your husband
got AIDS.
I go off in the hospital.
Nobody tells me nuthin’.
He come home.
He say it’s not true,
he’s fine.
He’s so skinny without his clothes
he try to hide hisself nekkid
don’t want me to look.
I say you got to use
one of those things.
He say nuthin’s wrong.
with him.

III

He stop sayin’ that.
Now he just say he’s gonna die
all the time
all the time
dying.
I say STOP that talk,
the doctor say you could
live a long time
my sister-in-law say,
he got it so you got it
it’s like that.
I say, I don’t got it,
my kids don’t got it either.
Teacher, I need a letter for welfare
that I’m coming to school
on a regular basis.

IV

He’s in P.R.,
before that he started messing around
again.
Over the Christmas holidays
he died.
That’s where I was at
in P.R.
I’m fine. Yeah, I’m sure teacher.
What do I wanna do teacher?
I just wanna read some different
kinda books.

More about Black Wings & Blind Angels

Read more poems from Black Wings & Blind Angels

More about Push

About Sapphire

April 27: Description of Her Eyes by Franz Wright

snash — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 05:00:04 +0000

On love, from Franz Wright.

Description of Her Eyes

Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now—

then it’s changed,
I change my mind.

Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.

April 26: There is No City that Does Not Dream by Anne Michaels

snash — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 05:00:01 +0000

This poem by Anne Michaels, written more than a decade ago, anticipates some of the themes of her new novel The Winter Vault, a passionate love story which juxtaposes historic events—the building of the St Lawrence Seaway and the Aswan Dam—with intimate moments in the lives of the characters, whose paths are altered in the course of their involvement with these ambitious constructions.

There is No City that Does Not Dream

There is no city that does not dream
from its foundations. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of the brickmakers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.

Download a broadside of “There is No City that Does Not Dream”

More about Winter Vault

More about Poems

About Anne Michaels

April 25: Some Playthings by John Hollander

snash — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 05:00:09 +0000

“Some Playthings,” by the distinguished John Hollander, a poet for whom serious and light verse, the formal and the playful, flow forth in equal measure.

Some Playthings

A trembling brown bird
standing in the high grass turns
out to be a blown

oakleaf after all.
Was the leaf playing bird, or
was it “just” the wind

playing with the leaf?
Was my very noticing
itself at play with

an irregular
frail patch of brown in the cold
April afternoon?

These questions that hang
motionless in the now-stilled
air: what of their

frailty, in the light
of even the most fragile
of problematic

substances like all
these momentary playthings
of recognition?

Questions that are asked
of questions: no less weighty
and lingeringly

dark than the riddles
posed by any apparent
bird or leaf or breath

of wind, instruments
probing what we feel we know
for some kind of truth.

Purchase a signed edition of A Draft of Light

More about A Draft of Light

About John Hollander