April is National Poetry Month: Dog Music

Dog Music is an anthology edited by Joseph Duerner and Jim Simmerman dedicated to dogs. I really love the collection, but as always with poems about pets, too many of them are sad. Today I didn't want to share a poem about the death of a dog. Here is a happier one about a springer spaniel named Cynthia.

Lines on a Dog's Face

Wallace said, "What the eye beholds may be
The text of life," and in this case it is
The Springer, Cynthia, whose eyes
Are the brown corridors of vaduity,
Moral deserts where the absolute Nothing
Is, or nothing but her repetitions,
The fence line patrol, the daily quarrels
With the cat, begging always for scraps
And a nap to sleep it off, then waiting
Alert for something to be known.

Agent of operation, living primordium,
Memoir of Something clearly in her stare
Which would say only, "I have known this
For a very long time, retriever
Of the stick locked in crocodile teeth,
Living the life of the fanciful
Scenario, chasing doves, the evening
Meal, her wrinkles busily playing
Out a program, a sontermporary opinion,
The repetitions that govern her earth, and mine.

-Michael Gessner

My springer spaniel Annie

April is National Poetry Month: A Kitchen Memory

 my mom in her kitchen

I asked my sixth grade students today to explain why they liked poetry. One said " it is like reading a story... only shorter and with better words." Strings: A Gathering of Family Poems is like reading a whole collection of family memoirs... only shorter with stronger images. This anthology illustrates all the strings that tie families together with poems about grandparents, uncles, aunts, siblings, parents, and children to name a few.
Each of us could take any kitchen and conjure up  memories based on sounds, smells, sights, and tastes.

A Kitchen Memory
My mother is peeling an apple over the sink,
her two deft hands effortless and intent.
The skin comes away in the shape of a corkscrew,
red and white by turns, with a shimmer of rose
where the blade in its turn cuts close: a blush,
called out of hiding like a second skin.
Now the apple fattens in her hand;
the last scrap of parings falls away;
and she halves and sections the white grainy meat,
picks up another apple, brushes back
the dark hair at her temple with the knife hand.
The only sound is the fan stirring the heat.
- Roy Scheele

"The Rowdy Girls":Designing Woman Classic: RIP Dixie Carter

One of the things that makes the television sitcom "Designing Women" so endearing is how the script used the four women to deal with serious issues with humor and grace. This one below is most of  a whole episode that dealt with wife abuse. I remember watching this one time with my sister and getting misty eyed. I watched it again this morning when I heard the news about the passing of Dixie Carter. Misty eyed again.

Sibling Assignment #128: " April Is the Cruelest Month"

Silver Valley Girl gave another assignment using the theme of April. "In T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Burial of the Dead”, Eliot refers to April as the cruelest month.  Read the poem, and write about  Eliot’s thoughts on the month of April."
I will link my siblings' posts when they are available. "The Burial of the Dead" is the first section of the much longer poem "The Waste Land".

The Burial of the Dead
by T.S. Eliot

" April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried turbers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour."

You can find the complete poem here.

After the war, through the eyes of a child, April was the cruelest month. It was " mixing memory and desire." After war or any type of winter, we want spring to come badly. Spring represents renewed spirit, reawakening, resurrection. Through the eyes of this child or even through the eyes of this adult woman, April can be cruel. Flowers can bloom, then the earth will freeze. Trees can fill with buds only to be blown away in an afternoon. The first violets can be buried in a late snowfall. Growing up in Kellogg we had a long winter, a gray period, then a short spring that emerged in May. There was always a desire for spring. A yearning for the lilacs to bloom, pansies to be planted, and syringa to burst forth on the hillsides. We were chilly in our light Easter dresses. No Easter egg hunts outside for us. We weren't coming out of a war during our April, but you did often wonder what branches would grow out of the stony rubbish of a long winter.

The end of winter is cruel on the spirits of my students. They are lethargic, often tired, and can't get motivated. Coming back from a break they hoped to greet April with a renewed spirit. It is coming. I saw it when the sun shone for awhile the other day. I saw slumped shoulders when the wind blew and snow fell again shortly after. I see baseball mitts and sunglasses. It is coming.

This represents hope I observed today in my garden. I too wanted to be the hyacinth girl. I didn't have enough to have my arms full, but just the scent of those blue flowers pushed the cruel April away a bit.

April is National Poetry Month: Magic Words

I first wrote about this anthology in November. You can find that post here. This volume had been recommended to me by a former student Shawna and I have returned to it again and again. It is an international anthology of poems with translations edited by Czeslaw Milosz. This reminded me of a conversation with one of my students the other day. He was reflected on the way of life for the native people on the reservation and how he would be living if other cultures had never come on the land. I will share this poem with him.

Magic Words

In a very earliest time,
when both people and animals lived on earth,
a person could become an animal if he wanted to
and an animal could become a human being.
Sometimes they were people
and sometimes animals
and there was no difference.
All spoke the same language.
That was the time when words were like magic.
The human mind had mysterious powers.
A word spoken by chance
might have strange consequences.
It would suddenly come alive
and what people wanted to happen could happen-
all you had to do was say it.
Nobody could explain this:
That's the way it was.

translated from the Inuit by Edward Field

April is National Poetry Month: poetry 180

Billy Collins, inspired by his poem-a-day program with the Library of Congress, chose 180 contemporary poems for this anthology . The 180-degree turn refers to a turning back to poetry. " Flip through the book and pick a poem, any poem. I know every one is an ace, or at least a face card, because I personally rigged the deck." Billy Collins
Being faced with a book of aces or at least a queen or jack, you can well imagine the challenge I had choosing a poem from this anthology! I loved the idea of the following poem. The author identified threads of his life that was woven into a poetic autobiography.

Autobiographia

I had everything and luck: Rings of smoke
blown for me; sunlight safe inside the leaves
of cottonwoods; pure, simple harmonies
of church music, echoes of slave songs; scraps
of candy wrappers-airborne. Everything.
Mother and father, brother, aunts, uncles;
chores and schoolwork and playtime. Everything.

I was given gloves against winter cold,
I was made to wear gloves when I gardened.
I was made to garden; taught to hold forks
in my left hand when cutting, in my right
when bringing food to my mouth. Everything.

I had clothes I was told not to wear outside;
a face you could clean up to almost handsome;
I had friends to fight with and secrets, spread
all over the neighborhood, the best teachers,
white and colored. I'm not making this up.
I knew that I had everything. Still do.

-G.E. Patterson

Mom, August 2009, Rockaway Beach, Oregon