I Had Dreams

I had beautiful dreams and was
Also happy when awake,
Always thanks to you, never
From myself in myself, so continue to be,
Now, only yourselves for me,
Like yellow flags, irises, girls by the water.

Translation by Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough.

Excerpt from THEY CARRY A PROMISE Translation © 2009 by 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.

Click here to learn more about Janusz Szuber’s They Carry a Promise.

Click here to download the broadside for “I Had Dreams.”

The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart

The wind blows
through the doors of my heart.
It scatters my sheet music
that climbs like waves from the piano, free of the keys.
Now the notes stripped, black butterflies,
flattened against the screens.
The wind through my heart
blows all my candles out.
In my heart and its rooms is dark and windy.
From the mantle smashes birds’ nests, teacups
full of stars as the wind winds round,
a mist of sorts that rises and bends and blows
or is blown through my rooms of my heart
that shatters the windows,
rakes the bedsheets as though someone
had just made love. And my dresses
they are lifted like brides come to rest
on the bedstead, crucifixes,
dresses tangled in trees in the rooms
of my heart. To save them
I’ve thrown flowers to fields,
so that someone would pick them up
and know where they came from.
Come the bees now clinging to flowered curtains.
Off with the clothesline pinning anything, my mother’s trousseau.
It is not for me to say what is this wind
or how it came to blow through the rooms of my heart.
Wing after wing, through the rooms of the dead
the wind does not blow. Nor the basement, no wheezing,
no wind choking the cobwebs in our hair.
It is cool here, quiet, a quilt spread on soil.
But we will never lie down again.

Excerpt from THE WIND BLOWS THROUGH THE DOORS OF MY HEART © 2010 by The Estate of Deborah Digges. 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.

Click here to learn more about Deborah Digges’s The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart.

PEARL LONDON: Let me say that, first, I’m so delighted, because we’ve all been wondering who Amy Clampitt is and what she looks like, and now we have you with us. Tell us about the metaphor of “Black Buttercups.” Are there really “black buttercups that never see daylight”?

AMY CLAMPITT: No. [Laughter] I’m very happy to talk about this poem because I think perhaps this poem has been longer in the making than almost anything I’ve ever finished. In various forms I was trying to write about what for strange reasons was for me a very traumatic experience— it sounds simple enough, moving from one house to another. But in the process of thinking about that experience, I suppose I began going back into something that went deeper. I’m not being psychoanalytical, but the metaphor of the black buttercups has to do with unfulfilled possibilities. I suppose we all know about such things in our own background and among our own families, among friends: about the experience of being moved from one place to another—”uprooted,” as it were— at the age of not quite ten.… One problem I ran into in writing this poem— I was going to describe an idyllic place I was forced to leave, but the fact is, although it was an idyllic place in my memory, there’s also a place where I discovered a lot of nonidyllic things. So have you got a poem there anymore? I don’t know. That’s one reason why it took me a long time to write this, because it turns out that when I started thinking about the years I spent in that house, which was the earliest house I remembered, I had to acknowledge that there were many things that were anything but idyllic. So I suppose that’s kind of the central core of the poem— there are these contradictions and there is this sense of things that went wrong that were never acknowledged. So that’s the black buttercups really.

LONDON: In “Black Buttercups” you ask, “When / . . . did the rumor / of unhappiness arrive?” And then we know that there’s that whole sense of menace and there is no safety— menace in the water, menace where the bull is in the pasture, and menace walking in that graveyard, I think it was. But that one understands in childhood. What was difficult to grasp for us were some of the particulars. Let me read you these lines and see if you can comment for us: “The look of exile / foreseen, however massive or inconsequential, / hurts the same; it’s the remembered / particulars that differ.”

[reads]

How is one to measure
the loss of two blue spruces, a waterfall
of bridal wreath below the porch, the bluebells
and Dutchman’s-breeches my grandmother
had brought in from the timber
to bloom in the same plot with peonies
and lilies of the valley? Or out past
the pasture where the bull, perennially
resentful, stood for the menace of authority
(no leering, no snickering in class),
an orchard—or a grove of willows
at the far edge of the wet meadow
marking the verge, the western barrier
of everything experience had verified?

CLAMPITT: That whole catalog is really things that— I could go on forever. Part of the difficulty of writing that poem was to narrow down all of the things that I remembered, and they’re mostly growing things. My earliest memories were flowers, and it seems as though the pleasure I found in being a child had to do with spring arriving and finding things in bloom, and when you’re a child, of course, it seems like a thousand years since the last spring; you don’t believe it’ll ever arrive again. So they tended to gather around things that bloom; that’s what I meant.

_____________________________

Black Buttercups

In March, the farmer’s month
for packing up and moving on, the rutted
mud potholed with glare, the verb to move
connoted nothing natural, such as the shifting
of the course of streams or of the sun’s
position, sap moving up, or even
couples dancing. What the stripped root, exhumed
above the mudhole’s brittle skin, discerned
was exile.
                 Exile to raw clapboard,
a privy out in back, a smokehouse
built by the pioneers, no shade trees
but a huddle of red cedars, exposure
on the highest elevation in the township,
a gangling windmill harped on by each
indisposition of the weather,
the mildewed gurgle of a cistern
humped underneath it like a burial.
                                                    Menace
inhabited that water when the pioneers,
ending their trek from North Carolina, farther
than Ur of the Chaldees had been from Canaan,
settled here and tried to root themselves:
four of the family struck down on this farm
as its first growing season ended. Menace
still waited, literally around the corner,
in the graveyard of a country church,
its back against the timber
just where the terrain began to drop (the creek
down there had for a while powered a sawmill,
but now ran free, unencumbered, useless)—
that not-to-be-avoided plot whose honed stones’
fixed stare, fanned in the night
by passing headlights, struck back
the rueful semaphore:
There is no safety.
                                  I was ten years old.
Not three miles by the road that ran
among the farms (still less if
you could have flown, or, just as unthinkable,
struck out across country, unimpeded
by barbed wire or the mire of feedlots)
the legendary habitat of safety
lay contained: the memory
of the seedleaf in the bean, the blind
hand along the bannister, the virgin sheath
of having lived nowhere but here. Back there
in the dining room, last summer’s
nine-year-old sat crying on the window seat
that looked into the garden, rain
coursing the pane in streams, the crying
on the other side and it one element—and sits
there still, still crying, knowing
for the first time forever what it was
to be heartbroken.
                                  The look of exile
foreseen, however massive or inconsequential,
hurts the same; it’s the remembered
particulars that differ. How is one to measure
the loss of two blue spruces, a waterfall
of bridal wreath below the porch, the bluebells
and Dutchman’s-breeches my grandmother
had brought in from the timber
to bloom in the same plot with peonies
and lilies of the valley? Or, out past
the pasture where the bull, perennially
resentful, stood for the menace of authority
(no leering, no snickering in class),
an orchard—or a grove of willows
at the far edge of the wet meadow
marking the verge, the western barrier
of everything experience had verified? We never
thought of going there except in February,
when the sap first started working up
the pussywillow wands, the catkins
pink underneath a down of eldritch silver
like the new pigs whose birthing coincided,
shedding their crisp cupolas’ detritus
on the debris of foundering snowbanks
brittle as the skin of standing ponds
we trod on in the meadow, a gauche travesty
of calamity like so many entertainments—
the nuptial porcelain, the heirloom crystal
vandalized by wanton overshoes, bundled- up
boredom lolling, while the blue world reeled
up past the pussywillow undersides of clouds
latticed by swigging catkins soon to haze
with pollen-bloat, a glut
run riot while the broken pond
unsealed, turned to mud
and, pullulating, came up buttercups
lucent with a mindlessness as total
as the romp that ends up wet-mittened,
chap-cheeked, fretful beside the kitchen stove,
later to roughhouse or whine its way
upstairs to bed.
                                  Night froze it up again
for the ten thousandth time, closing the seals
above the breeding ground of frogs, the Acheron
of dreadful disappointed Eros
stirring up hell—the tics,
the shame, the pathological ambition,
anxiety so thick sometimes that nothing
breeds there except more anxiety,
hampering yet another generation, all
the sodden anniversaries of dread:
black buttercups that never see daylight
or with lucent chalices drink of the sun.
Did we then hear them moving
wounded from room to room? Or in what shape
was it we first perceived it—the unstanched
hereditary thing, working its way
along the hollows of the marrow,
the worry taking root within like ragweed,
the noxious pollen flowering into
nothing but sick headaches
passed down like an heirloom? When,
under the same roof the memory of
a legendary comfort had endowed
with what in retrospect would seem
like safety, did the rumor
of unhappiness arrive? I remember waking,
a February morning leprous with frost
above the dregs of a halfhearted snowfall,
to find the gray world of adulthood
everywhere, as though there never
had been any other, in that same house
I could not bear to leave, where even now
the child who wept to leave still sits
weeping at the thought of exile.

Excerpt from POETRY IN PERSON © 2010 by Alexander Neubauer. 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.

Click here to learn more about Alexander Neubauer’s Poetry in Person and Amy Clampitt’s Selected Poems, edited by Mary Jo Salter.

DEAD SEAGULL

Seagull in the corn, postage stamp-size cornfield in the woods,
in the middle of the state, and how you ever got here. Weather
of heaven, July Massachusetts, the blue sky one endless goodbye.
Give me a minute, maggot-swarming preview of the future, give
me a moment. You can hone a blade until there is no blade, or
dwell with magnifying glass so long on a word that finally it darkens,
is not, and fire in widening circles consumes the world. For a moment
only, stay with me, mystery. Before you change completely into
something other, slow cloud, entrance, spell, not yet remembered
name, stay; tell me what you mean. A dead bird is not a dead bird
I was once told by someone who knows.

Excerpt from KINDERTOTENWALD © 2011 by Franz Wright. 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.

Click here to learn more about Franz Wright’s Kindertotenwald.

Throughout the book, Merrill uses upper-case letters to indicate when voices are speaking from the board. Thus Ephraim’s words are given in caps below, in this section which tells of his initial instructional visit with JM (whom the spirits called “scribe”) and DJ (called “hand”).

Correct but cautious, that first night, we asked
Our visitor’s name, era, habitat.
EPHRAIM came the answer. A Greek Jew
Born AD 8 at XANTHOS    Where was that?
In Greece WHEN WOLVES & RAVENS WERE IN ROME
(Next day the classical dictionary yielded
A Xanthos on the Asia Minor Coast.)
NOW WHO ARE U    We told him. ARE U XTIANS
We guessed so. WHAT A COZY CATACOMB
Christ had WROUGHT HAVOC in his family,
ENTICED MY FATHER FROM MY MOTHER’S BED
(I too had issued from a broken home—
The first of several facts to coincide.)
Later a favorite of TIBERIUS    Died
AD 36 on CAPRI    throttled
By the imperial guard for having LOVED
THE MONSTERS NEPHEW (sic) CALIGULA
Rapidly he went on—changing the subject?
A long incriminating manuscript
Boxed in bronze lay UNDER PORPHYRY
Beneath the deepest evacuations. He
Would help us find it, but we must please make haste
Because Tiberius wanted it destroyed.
Oh? And where, we wondered to the void,
Was Tiberius these days? STAGE THREE

Why was he telling us? He’d overheard us
Talking to SIMPSON    Simpson? His LINK WITH EARTH
His REPRESENTATIVE    A feeble nature
All but bestial, given to violent
Short lives—one ending lately among flames
In an Army warehouse. Slated for rebirth
But not in time, said Ephraim, to prevent
The brat from wasting, just now at our cup,
Precious long distance minutes—don’t hang up!

So much facetiousness—well, we were young
And these were matters of life and death—dismayed us.
Was he a devil? His reply MY POOR
INNOCENTS left the issue hanging fire.
As it flowed on, his stream-of-consciousness
Deepened. There was a buried room, a BED
WROUGHT IN SILVER    I CAN LEAD U THERE
IF    If? U GIVE ME    What? HA HA YR SOULS
(Another time he’ll say that he misread
Our innocence for insolence that night,
And meant to scare us.) Our eyes met. What if . . .
The blood’s least vessel hoisted jet-black sails.
Five whole minutes we were frightened stiff
—But after all, we weren’t that innocent.
The Rover Boys at thirty, still red-blooded
Enough not to pass up an armchair revel
And pure enough at heart to beat the devil,
Entered into the spirit, so to speak,
And said they’d leave for Capri that same week.

Pause. Then, as though we’d passed a test,
Ephraim’s whole manner changed. He brushed aside
Tiberius and settled to the task
Of answering, like an experienced guide,
Those questions we had lacked the wit to ask.

Here on Earth—huge tracts of information
Have gone into these capsules flavorless
And rhymed for easy swallowing—on Earth
We’re each the REPRESENTATIVE of a PATRON
—Are there that many patrons? YES O YES
These secular guardian angels fume and fuss
For what must seem eternity over us.
It is forbidden them to INTERVENE
Save, as it were, in the entr’acte between
One incarnation and another. Back
To school from the disastrously long vac
Goes the soul its patron crams yet once
Again with savoir vivre. Will the dunce
Never—by rote, the hundredth time round—learn
What ropes make fast that point of no return,
A footing on the lowest of NINE STAGES
Among the curates and the minor mages?
Patrons at last ourselves, an upward notch
Our old ones move    THEYVE BORNE IT ALL FOR THIS
And take delivery from the Abyss
Of brand-new little savage souls to watch.
One difference: with every rise in station
Comes a degree of PEACE FROM REPRESENTATION
—Odd phrase, more like a motto for abstract
Art—or for Autocracy—In fact
Our heads are spinning—From the East a light—
BUT U ARE TIRED MES CHERS    SWEET DREAMS    TOMORROW NIGHT

Excerpt from THE CHANGING LIGHT AT SANDOVER © 1980, 1982 by James Merrill. 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.

Click here to learn more about James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover.

After the Movie

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing
       about the movie.
He says that be believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.

I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone,
       then come to a day

when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.

I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.

I say, Maybe we mean different things by the
       same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist
       even in the murderous heart.

I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then
       what is it?

We’re walking along West 16th Street – a clear
       unclouded night – and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is
       action, I used to say to him.

Simone Weil says that when you really love you are
       able to look at someone you want to eat and not
       eat them.

Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart
       now baby.

Meister Eckhart says that as long as we love any
       image we are doomed to live in purgatory.

Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue
       saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just
       bought -

again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and
       suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made.

What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict.
       You are a nun.”

Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him
       to think these things of me even if he’s not
       thinking them?

Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns
       clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to
       lengthen,

we both know the winter has only begun.

Poem © 2008 from The Kingdom of Ordinary Time by Marie Howe, used by gracious permission of W.W. Norton. Excerpt from KILLER VERSE © 2011 by Everyman’s Library. Excerpted by permission of Everyman’s Library, 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.

Click here to learn more about Killer Verse.

Possessed

I have never left. Your bodies are before me
at all times, in the dark I see
the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns
wheeling over my bed, and the darkness
is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads
over my crib, your body-hairs
which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows,
one by one. And I never leave your sight,
I can look in the eyes of any stranger and
find you there, in the rich swimming
bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the
blue that reflects from the knife’s blade,
and I smell you always, the dead cigars and
Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming,
the slow stopped bear tread and the
quick fox, her nails on the ice,
and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the
coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts
opening like jaws, drops from your glands
clinging to my walls like pearls in the night.
You think I left—I was the child
who got away, thousands of miles,
but not a day goes past that I am not
turning someone into you.
Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I
turn now, in the fear of this moment,
into your soft stained paw
resting on her breast, into your breast trying to
creep away from under his palm—
your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails,
your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.

Excerpt from THE DEAD AND THE LIVING © 1975, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983 by Sharon Olds. 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.

Click here to learn more about Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living.

Come out to the LIVE poetry event tonight (Monday, April 23) featuring Poet Laureate Philip Levine, 2012 Pulitzer Prize Winner Tracy K. Smith, and two fantastic poets from the Tumblr community: Saeed Jones and Karolina Manko.

The event begins at 7 pm at Housing Works Bookstore Cafe, 126 Crosby St., in NYC. Open bar. Amazing poetry. Poet Laureate. Pulitzer Prize Winner. Poets from the Tumblr community. Come out to celebrate poetry with us!

A minute later George came back down, with Jonah at his heels, and Daphne’s mauve album open in his hands. “My word, sis . . . ,” he said abstractedly, turning the page and continuing to read; “he’s certainly done you proud!”

“What is it?” said Daphne, pushing back her chair but determined to keep her dignity, almost to seem indifferent. Not just his name, then: she could see it was much, much more—now that the book was here, open, in the room, she felt quite frightened at the thought of what might come out of it.

“The gentleman left it in the room,” said Jonah, looking from one to the other of them.

“Yes, thank you,” said Daphne. George was blinking slowly and softly biting his lower lip in concentration. He might have been pondering how to break some rather awkward news to her, as he came and sat down across from her, placing the book on the table, then turning the pages back to start again. “Well, when you’ve finished,” Daphne said tartly, but also with reluctant respect. What Cecil had written was poetry, which took longer to read, and his handwriting wasn’t of the clearest.

“Goodness,” said George, and looked up at her with a firm little smile. “I think you should feel thoroughly flattered.”

“Oh, really?” said Daphne. “Should I?” It seemed George was determined to master the poem and its secrets before he let her see a word of it.

“No, this is quite something,” he said, shaking his head as he ran back over it. “You’re going to have to let me copy this out for myself.” Daphne drained her teacup completely, folded her napkin, glanced across at the two servants, who were smiling stupidly at the successful retrieval of the book, and also formed a somewhat inhibiting audience to this agitating crisis in her life, and then said, as lightly as she could, “Don’t be such a tease, George, let me see.” Of course it was a tease, the latest of thousands, but it was more than that, and she knew resentfully that George couldn’t help it.

“Sorry, old girl,” he said, and sat back at last, and slid the album towards her.

“Thank you!” said Daphne.

“If you could see your face,” said George.

She pushed her plate aside—”Will you take all this, please,” to the maid; who did so, with gaping slowness, peering at the columns of Cecil’s black script as though they confirmed a rather dubious opinion she’d formed of him. “Thank you,” said Daphne again sharply; and frowned and coloured, unable to take in a word of the poem. She had to find out at once what George meant, that she should be flattered. Was this it, the sudden helpless breaking of the news? Perhaps not, or George would have said something more. The harder she looked at it, the less she knew. Well, it was called, simply, “Two Acres,” and it ran on over five pages, both sides of the paper—she flicked back and forth.

“Formally, it’s rather simple,” said George, “for Cecil.”

“Well, quite,” said Daphne.

“Just regular tetrameter couplets.”

“That will be all,” said Daphne, and waited while Veronica and Jonah went off. Really they were most irritating. She flicked further back for a moment, to the Revd. Barstow, with his scholarly flourish, “B. A. Dunelm”; and then forward to Cecil, who had broken all the rules of an autograph book with his enormous entry, and made everyone else look so feeble and dutiful. It was unmannerly, and she wasn’t sure if she resented it or admired it. His writing grew smaller and faster as it sloped down the page. On the first page the bottom line turned up sideways at the end to fit in—”Chaunticleer,” she read, which was a definite poetry word, though she wasn’t precisely sure of its meaning.

“I suppose he’ll be publishing it somewhere,” said George, “the Westminster Review or somewhere.”

“Do you think?” said Daphne, as levelly as she could, but with a quick strong feeling that the poem was hers after all. Cecil hadn’t just written it here, in her book, by chance. She was still trying to see if it said things about her personally, or if it was simply about the house—and the garden:

                         The Jenny nettle by the wall,
                         That some the Devil’s Play-thing call—

that was a conversation she’d had with him—now quite simply turned into poetry. Her father had called stinging nettles Devil’s Play-things, it was what they called them in Devon. She felt thrilled, and a little bewildered, at being in on the very making of a poem, and at something else magical, like seeing oneself in a photograph. What else would be revealed?

                         The book left out beneath the trees,
                         Read over backwards by the breeze.
                         The spinney where the lisping larches
                         Kiss overhead in silver arches
                         And in their shadows lovers too
                         Might kiss and tell their secrets through.

Again the minutely staggered and then breathtaking merging of word, image and fact. She was really going to have to read this somewhere apart, in private. “I think it would be most appropriate to read this in the garden,” she said, getting up and feeling very slightly sick; but just then her mother appeared in the doorway, with her heavy morning face, and her bright morning manner. In fact her manner was flustered; there was something behind her smile. Word must already have got through. Beyond her Veronica loitered, the informer.

“Well, child . . . !” her mother said, and gave Daphne a strange, eager look. “What excitements.”

“Everyone can see it when I’ve finished reading it,” said Daphne. “People seem to be forgetting that it’s my book.”

Excerpt from THE STRANGER’S CHILD © 2011 by Alan Hollinghurst. 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.

Click here to learn more about Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger’s Child.

Serenade

I wake to the cracked plate
of moon being thrown

across the room—
that’ll fix me

for trying sleep.
Lately even night

has left me—
now even the machine

that makes the rain
has stopped sending

the sun away.
It is late,

or early, depending—

who’s to say.
Who’s to name

these ragged stars, this
light that waters

down the milky dark
before I down

it myself.
Sleep, I swear

there’s no one else—
raise me up

in the near-night
& set me like

a tin toy to work,
clanking in the bare

broken bright.

Excerpt from DEAR DARKNESS © 2008 by Kevin Young. 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.

Click here to learn more about Kevin Young’s Dear Darkness.