Poetry?

So today is Allen Ginsburg's birthday. Apparently, he once said,
"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does."

This is  so true. Which is why, most of the things I compose in my head, never actually get written down. When I was younger, I used to write poetry. I rarely showed it to anyone because I was young and full of hang ups and didn't want to make that private stuff public. Now I am older, I don't care so much about what anybody else thinks, but I am so busy living a grown up life, that I don't actually write much. I have always considered myself a writer, even if I was only writing for a degree, or for myself, or for the EO newsletter. But now I have these blogs and I don't do much with them. My head is still going all the time, but really,  I guess I am pretty content to just be, and live in my shrinking world.

Little world
little people
little thoughts
little deeds.
Big is good
big is fine
big is there
for another time.
Just a mother
just a wife
just a woman
just a life.

A poem a day

So I get the Writer's Almanac sent to my inbox. Every day, there is a poem for me, and almost every day I read it, and once in a while, one gets under my skin and I think about it and think about it and wish I had a younger memory, so I could say it to myself over and over.

Yesterday was a poem by Denver Butson. And I have been reading some more of his poetry here.
I worry about copywrite, and if I am supposed to do this, but since the poems are already on the internet, and since I want you to go read more, and I will probably even buy a book, here we go, just so you can get a taste.

Beauty or Flight

by Denver Butson

The man who jumped from the highway bridge one afternoon

who drove his car along in rush hour traffic

then carefully pulled it over, fussed with something briefly on the dash,

so casually that another driver passing

thought he was looking for a map, or a cassette tape,

that had slid during the last turn before the bridge — that's all —

and then stepped out of the car, standing, stretching,

and closing the door routinely, a man in need of a break

on a long drive, a man untroubled by his next appointment,

a man who felt himself growing tired and thought

he needed some air, looked up the highway once

and then down at the almost frozen rows of traffic

under the haze that lingered above the bridge

and then broke simply and suddenly into a run, a dead run,

one motorist called it, crossing in front of his car

and not even stopping at the railing between the bridge

and the empty space beside the bridge, entering that space

and opening his mouth in what one driver called a scream,

though she heard no sound above the drone of traffic, and

other drivers saw as a gasp for breath, not unlike a child takes

when diving into a backyard pool, and he executed then

a nearly perfect, if a little rushed, swan dive out across the space

next to the bridge and into the water ninety-five feet below.

One fisherman in a boat a little upstream

saw the man who jumped from the highway bridge,

the moment he left the bridge and entered his dive, and the fisherman

swore he saw not a man but a large bird, a falcon or an eagle,

shot mid-flight by an angry driver, a large bird

who was trying to regain some sense of beauty, some sense of flight,

in its final dying seconds

 

I think the thing I like about the few poems that I have read thus far is that they paint a picture without telling the reader how she is supposed to feel about it. He has the words, but the rest is up to me. He wrote a poem about his brother's suicide as well as the one above, but I can't quite fathom why they don't leave me feeling melancholy or depressed, especially considering I spent a lot of my life contemplating suicide. I don't think it is because he is an optimist. He isn't painting a rosy picture. He is simply observing what is happening, and showing that there are different perspectives, as in the poem above. I like the idea that there are different ways of looking at things, although this did used to lead me to tie myself in knots, trying to acknowledge  everybody else's feelings - trying to figure out what my responsibilities were there.

 

The thing about poetry, (and I am not going to differentiate between good and bad poetry) is that if there is something in it that resonates within you, it can transport you somewhere. That sounds really pretentious, or just plain stupid, but I mean that if you take a minute, to read a poem, and then go where it leads you, visualise it, feel it, maybe think about it, it can change your perspective. Or maybe it just gets under your skin for a while, and then you move on.  

Joyce Sutphen

So the poetry book that I asked my mother to get for me arrived. It is Joyce Sutphen's 2010 collection, First Words.

I must say that I am really enjoying it. I haven't read it all yet, but it resonates within me on many levels. There are poems recollecting her childhood, poems about her parents, poems about her children. And I just guess that I am in a space where I can look at all of these things. I am now old enough where I can look at my childhood and adolescence without the anger that I felt for a long time. I was adolescent for a very long time. I blamed everything on....whatever there was. I didn't grow up on a farm like Joyce Sutphen did. I didn't have an idyllic childhood, I just had a normal childhood. There were good things and bad things, and I like remembering the good things. Like cookies with coloured sugar on them, playing tennis in the street, making a situpon at Brownies, and feeling that I could go anywhere on my bike.

Being a liberal minded teen in midwest America was crap, but we will save that for another day's recollections.

For today, here is one of the poems, called Krinkletop Cookies

What was nice about that recipe
was that it didn't require eggs
and that it was something my mother's

mother's grandmother made. "Krinkletops,"
we called them, close to what my great-great-
grandmother called them in the Old World.

I always measured the sugar first
(white, scooped from the bin),
then added lard from the crock

and dark molasses poured out
in a mahogany ribbon.  Then flour,
sifted with ginger, cloves,

cinnamon, and soda to make
a sweet and spicy smell, which was
another nice thing about that recipe-

that and the pleasure of rolling
dough into balls (dipped in sugar
and pressed down on the cookie sheet)

and seeing the righteous hills
rise up and collapse into rows
of cracked and krinkle sugar deserts.


When I read this, I remember rolling cookies into dough balls myself, and realizing what it meant to roll them about the size of a  walnut. For some reason, I thought that that  knowledge made me grown up. :-) We had a walnut tree in our back garden, so why I didn't know what walnut sized meant was a mystery. Maybe it was because to me, walnuts were big green things that fell off  of that tree. (The tree had boards nailed it so I could climb, and it also had fuzzy caterpillars every spring.)

I remember making Snickerdoodles, rolling them in sugar and cinnamon.
I remember making sugar cookies and flattening them with a glass that had been dipped in sugar.
I remember flattening out those rolled dough balls with a fork, making a criss cross design, and sprinkling on the green and red coloured sugar for Christmas bake sales. We were always baking for bake sales.

I remember pumpkin cookie cutters for Halloween, Raggedy Ann and Andy cookie cutters for fun, and heart shaped cookie cutters for Valentine's day, and more red sugar crystals on the hearts.

I miss the coloured sugar.