by Elisavietta Ritchie

Additional Advice for a Young Poet

"A writer has nothing to teach and everything
to learn, at all times." Albert Camus

1.

If you have only one paper napkin
for those six empty minutes
cover it with a poem.

Wipe your face
on the other side.
Between the splotches: write.

2.

Lose your pen?
Try a pencil. When this
breaks, wears out,

charcoal till you're black
as the burnt stick
worn to smudge.

Then write with ash
on the sea.
Write on grass.

Try red ink on flames,
blue on the sky,
white on snow.

When all implements
disappear,
use your blood.

3.

If all you have is a paper bag,
not the notebook you always keep
in your pocket, write.


If you shop only at thrifts, still hoard
a closetful to will when you're dead,
better leave poems than rags.


-originally appeared in Confrontation 2006

American Life in Poetry: Column 070

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

As a man I'll never gain the wisdom Sharon Olds 
expresses in this poem about motherhood, but one  
of the reasons poetry is essential is that it can 
take us so far into someone else's experience 
that we feel it's our own.


My Son the Man

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.


"My Son the Man" from THE WELLSPRING by Sharon Olds.  
Copyright (c) 1996 by Sharon Olds. Used by permission of  
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. This  
weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation,  
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English 
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does  
not accept unsolicited poetry.  
******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 069

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

This marvelous poem by the California poet  
Marsha Truman Cooper perfectly captures the  
world of ironing, complete with its intimacy.  
At the end, doing a job to perfection, pressing 
the perfect edge, establishes a reassuring order  
to an otherwise mundane and slightly tawdry world.


Ironing After Midnight

Your mother called it
"doing the pressing,"
and you know now
how right she was.
There is something urgent here.
Not even the hiss
under each button
or the yellow business
ground in at the neck
can make one instant
of this work seem unimportant.
You've been taught
to turn the pocket corners
and pick out the dark lint
that collects there.
You're tempted to leave it,
but the old lessons
go deeper than habits.
Everyone else is asleep.
The odor of sweat rises
when you do
under the armpits,
the owner's particular smell
you can never quite wash out.
You'll stay up.
You'll have your way,
the final stroke
and sharpness
down the long sleeves,
a truly permanent edge.


Reprinted from "River Styx," No. 32, 1990,  
by permission of the author, whose most recent 
book is "Substantial Holdings," Pudding House 
Publications, 2002. Poem copyright (c) 1990 
by Marsha Truman Cooper. This weekly column is  
supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library  
of Congress, and the Department of English at the 
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does 
not accept unsolicited poetry.  

******************************

American Life in Poetry: Column 068

BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Here is a marvelous little poem about a long marriage 
by the Kentucky poet, Wendell Berry. It's about a couple 
resigned to and comfortable with their routines. It is 
written in language as clear and simple as its subject. 
As close together as these two people have grown, as much 
alike as they have become, there is always the chance of 
the one, unpredictable, small moment of independence. Who 
will be the first to say goodnight?


They Sit Together on the Porch

They sit together on the porch, the dark
Almost fallen, the house behind them dark.
Their supper done with, they have washed and dried
The dishes--only two plates now, two glasses,
Two knives, two forks, two spoons--small work for two.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap,
At rest. He smokes his pipe. They do not speak,
And when they speak at last it is to say
What each one knows the other knows. They have
One mind between them, now, that finally
For all its knowing will not exactly know
Which one goes first through the dark doorway, bidding
Goodnight, and which sits on a while alone.


From "A Timbered Choir", by Wendell Berry. Copyright 
(c) 1998. Published and reprinted  by arrangement 
with Counterpoint Press, a member of the Perseus Books 
Group (www.perseusbooks.com). All rights reserved. This 
weekly column is supported by The Poetry Foundation, 
The Library of Congress, and the Department of English 
at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. This column does 
not accept unsolicited poetry.

******************************

by Wilda Morris

The Year the Herbs Went Wild

When breezes blew, sage and mint
shook seeds into the air.
They went wild, planting their offspring
in the daffodil patch, choking the mums,
filling the space between onions
and beans, leaping from the ground
beneath the gas grill.

Why did I allow this insurgency,
this rank attempt to take over
the garden? Perhaps because surgery
and radiation left me no energy
for coping with recalcitrance,
with over-abundance. Or perhaps
I couldn’t bear to be the surgeon
cutting into something so alive.


First published in SecondWind, Summer 2005.