Rope Sonnet

My sonnet on Rope, part of my sequence of Hitchcock sonnets, is up on the excellent site The Nervous Breakdown.

The Survivor of a Slasher Flick in Middle Age

I'm thrilled to have my poem, The Survivor of a Slasher Flick in Middle Age, up on Gerald So's Crime Poetry Weekly: The 5-2.

It's my ode to "the final girl," the lone female survivor of the horror flick, epitomized by Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween.

"The one character of stature who does live to tell the tale is in fact the Final Girl. She is introduced at the beginning and is the only character to be developed in any psychological detail. We understand immediately from the attention paid it that hers is the main story line. She is intelligent, watchful, levelheaded; the first character to sense something amiss and the only one to deduce from the accumulating evidence the pattern and extent of the threat; the only one, in other words, whose perspective approaches our own privileged understanding of the situation. We register her horror as she stumbles on the corpses of her friends. Her momentary paralysis in the face of death duplicates those moments of the universal nightmare experience—in which she is the undisputed “I"—on which horror frankly trades. When she downs the killer, we are triumphant. She is by any measure the slasher film’s hero. This is not to say that our attachment to her is exclusive and unremitting, only that it adds up, and that in the closing sequence (which can be quite prolonged) it is very close to absolute."

-- Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, 1992, Carol J. Clover

Hitchcock Sonnets Published ...

I'm thrilled that the very cool ezine District has just published three of my Hitchcock Sonnets: Champagne, Rear Window, and Psycho. You can check them out here.

Champagne, 1928

Rear Window, 1954

Pscyho, 1960

Poetry Monday

Birches

by Robert Frost

When I see birches bend to left and right

Across the lines of straighter darker trees,

I like to think some boy’s been swinging in them.

But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.

Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them

Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning

After a rain. They click upon themselves

As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored

As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.

Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells

Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—

Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away

You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,

And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed

So low for long, they never right themselves:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterward, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm

I should prefer to have some boy bend them

As he went out and in to fetch the cows—

Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,

Whose only play was what he found himself,

Summer or winter, and could play alone,

One by one he subdued his father’s trees

By riding them down over and over again

Until he took the stiffness out of them,

And not one but hung limp, not one was left

For him to conquer. He learned all there was

To learn about not launching out too soon

And so not carrying the tree away

Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise

To the top branches, climbing carefully

With the same pains you use to fill a cup

Up to the brim, and even above the brim.

Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,

Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once a swinger of birches.

And so I dream of going back to be.

It’s when I’m weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig’s having lashed across it open.

I’d like to get away from earth awhile

And then come back to it and begin over.

May no fate willfully misunderstand me

And half grant what I wish and snatch me away

Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love;

I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.

I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,

But dipped its top and set me down again.

That would be good both going and coming back.

One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Poetry Monday

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

by James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Poetry Monday

Sorry for the long break, but I've been battling that flu bug that is apparently everywhere. In my feverish funk I managed to watch Kenneth Longergan's infamous film Margaret, which I thought was pretty great. It's a long sophisticated take on an Upper West Side prep school girl's emotional breakdown after witnessing a horrific accident on the street (that she may or may not have caused). Anna Paquin is perfect as Lisa Cohen, who is often unlikable but completely real; she seems gripped by emotions that she does not remotely understand.

I hope Lonergan gets a chance to make another movie. This one had a delayed release because of his inability to turn in a 150 minute cut to satisfy the production companies. Lawsuits were filed, and in the end, Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker edited the film. That's pretty good punishment for being unable to do something yourself. It's actually a brilliant edit: moody at times, but incredibly paced.

There is no character named "Margaret" in the film. The title comes from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem "Spring & Fall: to a Young Child." Here's the justly famous poem:

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

Leáves like the things of man, you

With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?

Ah! ás the heart grows older

It will come to such sights colder

By and by, nor spare a sigh

Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;

And yet you wíll weep and know why.

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

Poetry Monday

Poem

by Simon Armitage

And if it snowed and snow covered the drive
he took a spade and tossed it to one side.
And always tucked his daughter up at night
And slippered her the one time that she lied. 

And every week he tipped up half his wage.
And what he didn't spend each week he saved.
And praised his wife for every meal she made.
And once, for laughing, punched her in the face. 

And for his mum he hired a private nurse.
And every Sunday taxied her to church.
And he blubbed when she went from bad to worse.
And twice he lifted ten quid from her purse. 

Here's how they rated him when they looked back:
sometimes he did this, sometimes he did that.

Poetry Monday

I just read Ian McEwan's latest novel, Sweet Tooth, which will certainly be one of my favorite books of the year. It's a twisty take on the spy novel, one that is actually far more about literature and love. There's a fair amount of poetry discussion in the novel, including a reference to one of my favorite Kingsley Amis poems, "A Bookstore Idyll". And there is reference to a poem I had never read by Edward Thomas called "Adlestrop."

Here are both poems, well worth reading.

A Bookshop Idyll

Between the GARDENING and the COOKERY

            Comes the brief POETRY shelf;

By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology

            Offers itself.

Critical, and with nothing else to do,

            I scan the contents page,

Relieved to find the names are mostly new;

            No one my age.

Like all strangers, they divide by sex:

            Landscape near Parma

Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,

            So does Rilke and Buddha.

“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read”

            These titles seem to say;

But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,

            Poem for J.,

The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter

            For several seconds;

From somewhere in this (as in any) matter

            A moral beckons.

Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart

            Or squash it flat?

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;

            Girls aren’t like that.

We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff

            Can get by without it.

Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;

            They write about it,

And the awful way their poems lay them open

            Just doesn’t strike them.

Women are really much nicer than men:

            No wonder we like them.

Deciding this, we can forget those times

            We sat up half the night

Chockfull of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,

            And couldn’t write.

                                   

Adlestrop

Yes. I remember Adlestrop—

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly. It was late June.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop—only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Poetry Monday

The Train Ride

by Ruth Stone

All things come to an end;
small calves in Arkansas,
the bend of the muddy river.
Do all things come to an end?
No, they go on forever.
They go on forever, the swamp,
the vine-choked cypress, the oaks
rattling last year’s leaves,
the thump of the rails, the kite,
the still white stilted heron.
All things come to an end.
The red clay bank, the spread hawk,
the bodies riding this train,
the stalled truck, pale sunlight, the talk;
the talk goes on forever,
the wide dry field of geese,
a man stopped near his porch
to watch. Release, release;
between cold death and a fever,
send what you will, I will listen.
All things come to an end.
No, they go on forever.

Poetry Monday

I re-watched Bright Star over the weekend and liked it even more than I did when I first saw it. Not that there is a lot of competition, but this has to be the best film about not just a poet but poetry. And for all its grief, and the sadness of its love story, it's a funny film, full of wit.

Here's John Keat's poem "Bright Star," where the film gets its title.

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art-- 
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death. 

Poetry Monday

To Help the Monkey Cross the River,

by Thomas Lux

which he must
cross, by swimming, for fruits and nuts,
to help him
I sit with my rifle on a platform
high in a tree, same side of the river
as the hungry monkey. How does this assist
him? When he swims for it
I look first upriver: predators move faster with
the current than against it.
If a crocodile is aimed from upriver to eat the monkey
and an anaconda from downriver burns
with the same ambition, I do
the math, algebra, angles, rate-of-monkey,
croc- and snake-speed, and if, if
it looks as though the anaconda or the croc
will reach the monkey
before he attains the river’s far bank,
I raise my rifle and fire
one, two, three, even four times into the river
just behind the monkey
to hurry him up a little.
Shoot the snake, the crocodile?
They’re just doing their jobs,
but the monkey, the monkey
has little hands like a child’s,
and the smart ones, in a cage, can be taught to smile.

Poetry Monday

MY NOVEMBER GUEST

by Robert Frost

 My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,      
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain    
Are beautiful as days can be;    
She loves the bare, the withered tree;      

She walks the sodden pasture lane.             
Her pleasure will not let me stay.      
She talks and I am fain to list:    
She’s glad the birds are gone away,    

She’s glad her simple worsted gray      
Is silver now with clinging mist.             
The desolate, deserted trees,      
The faded earth, the heavy sky,    

The beauties she so truly sees,    
She thinks I have no eye for these,     
And vexes me for reason why.             
Not yesterday I learned to know      

The love of bare November days    
Before the coming of the snow,    
But it were vain to tell her so,      
And they are better for her praise.

Poetry Monday

GOING THERE

By Jack Gilbert, 1925 - 2012

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

Poetry Monday

How To Die

by Siegfried Sassoon

Dark clouds are smouldering into red 
While down the craters morning burns. 
The dying soldier shifts his head 
To watch the glory that returns; 
He lifts his fingers toward the skies 
Where holy brightness breaks in flame; 
Radiance reflected in his eyes, 
And on his lips a whispered name. 

You’d think, to hear some people talk, 
That lads go West with sobs and curses, 
And sullen faces white as chalk, 
Hankering for wreaths and tombs and hearses. 
But they’ve been taught the way to do it 
Like Christian soldiers; not with haste 
And shuddering groans; but passing through it 
With due regard for decent taste. 

Poetry Monday

Found Poem

by Howard Nemerov

after information received in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 v 86

The population center of the USA
Has shifted to Potosi, in Missouri.

The calculation employed by authorities
In arriving at this dislocation assumes

That the country is a geometric plane,
Perfectly flat, and that every citizen,

Including those in Alaska and Hawaii
And the District of Columbia, weighs the same;

So that, given these simple presuppositions,
The entire bulk and spread of all the people

Should theoretically balance on the point
Of a needle under Potosi in Missouri

Where no one is residing nowadays
But the watchman over an abandoned mine

Whence the company got the lead out and left.
“It gets pretty lonely here,” he says, “at night.”