American Life in Poetry: Column 207

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

People singing, not professionally but just singing for joy, it's a wonderful celebration of life. In this poem by Sebastian Matthews of North Carolina, a father and son happen upon a handful of men singing in a cafe, and are swept up into their pleasure and community.

Barbershop Quartet, 

     East Village Grille

Inside the standard lunch hour din they rise, four

seamless voices fused into one, floating somewhere

between a low hum and a vibration, like the sound

of a train rumbling beneath noisy traffic.

The men are hunched around a booth table,

a fire circle of coffee cups and loose fists, leaning in

around the thing they are summoning forth

from inside this suddenly beating four-chambered

heart. I've taken Avery out on a whim, ordered quesadillas

and onion rings, a kiddy milk with three straws.

We're already deep in the meal, extra napkins

and wipes for the grease coating our faces

and hands like mid-summer sweat. And because

we're happy, lost in the small pleasures of father

and son, at first their voices seem to come from inside

us. Who's that boy singing? Avery asks, unable

to see these men wrapped in their act. I let him

keep looking, rapt. And when no one is paying

attention, I put down my fork and take my boy's hand,

and together we dive into the song. Or maybe it pours

into us, and we're the ones brimming with it.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c)2008 by Sebastian Matthews, whose collection of poems, "We Generous," was published by Red Hen Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from "The Chattahoochee Review," V. 28, no. 2,3, 2008 by permission of Sebastian Matthews.  Introduction copyright (c) 2009 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. 

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

American Life in Poetry: Column 206

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

Ah, yes, the mid-life crisis. And there's a lot of mid-life in which it can happen. Jerry Lee Lewis sang of it so well in "He's thirty-nine and holding, holding everything he can." And here's a fine poem by Matthew Vetter, portraying just such a man.

Wild Flowers

At fifty-six, having left my mother,

my father buys a motorcycle.

I imagine him because

it is the son's sorrowful assignment

to imagine his father: there,

hunched on his mount,

with black boots, with bad teeth,

between shifts at the mill,

ripping furrows in the backroads,

past barn and field and silo,

past creek and rock,

past the brown mare,

sleek in her impertinence,

never slowing until he sees

the bull. He stops, pulls

his bike to the side of the road,

where golden rod and clover grow,

walks up to the fence, admires

its horns, its wet snout snorting and blowing

its breath, its girth, its trampling

of small wild flowers.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c)2008 by Matthew Vetter. Reprinted from "The Louisville Review," No. 63, Spring 2008, by permission of Matthew Vetter.  Introduction copyright (c) 2009 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. 

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

American Life in Poetry: Column 205

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

Memories have a way of attaching themselves to objects, to details, to physical tasks, and here, George Bilgere, an Ohio poet, happens upon mixed feelings about his mother while slicing a head of cabbage.

Corned Beef and Cabbage

I can see her in the kitchen,

Cooking up, for the hundredth time,

A little something from her

Limited Midwestern repertoire.

Cigarette going in the ashtray,

The red wine pulsing in its glass,

A warning light meaning

Everything was simmering

Just below the steel lid

Of her smile, as she boiled

The beef into submission,

Chopped her way

Through the vegetable kingdom

With the broken-handled knife

I use tonight, feeling her

Anger rising from the dark

Chambers of the head

Of cabbage I slice through,

Missing her, wanting

To chew things over

With my mother again.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2002 by George Bilgere, whose most recent book of poetry is "Haywire," Utah State University Press, 2006. Poem reprinted from "The Good Kiss," published by The University of Akron Press, 2002, by permission of the author and publisher. Introduction copyright (c) 2009 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. 

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

American Life in Poetry: Column 202

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

David Wagoner, who lives in Washington state, is one of our country's most distinguished poets and the author of many wonderful books. He is also one of our best at writing about nature, from which we learn so much. Here is a recent poem by Wagoner that speaks to perseverance.

The Cherry Tree

Out of the nursery and into the garden

where it rooted and survived its first hard winter,

then a few years of freedom while it blossomed,

put out its first tentative branches, withstood

the insects and the poisons for insects,

developed strange ideas about its height

and suffered the pruning of its quirks and clutters,

its self-indulgent thrusts

and the infighting of stems at cross purposes

year after year. Each April it forgot

why it couldn't do what it had to do,

and always after blossoms, fruit, and leaf-fall,

was shown once more what simply couldn't happen.

Its oldest branches now, the survivors carved

by knife blades, rain, and wind, are sending shoots

straight up, blood red, into the light again.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c)2008 by David Wagoner, whose most recent book of poetry is "Good Morning and Good Night," University of Illinois Press, 2005. Reprinted from "Crazyhorse," No. 73, Spring 2008, by permission of David Wagoner. Introduction copyright (c) 2009 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. 

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

American Life in Poetry: Column 194

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

Father and child doing a little math homework together; it's an everyday occurrence, but here, Russell Libby, a poet who writes from Three Sisters Farm in central Maine, presents it in a way that makes it feel deep and magical.

Applied Geometry

Applied geometry,

measuring the height

of a pine from

like triangles,

Rosa's shadow stretches

seven paces in

low-slanting light of

late Christmas afternoon.

One hundred thirty nine steps

up the hill until the sun is

finally caught at the top of the tree,

let's see,

twenty to one,

one hundred feet plus a few to adjust

for climbing uphill,

and her hands barely reach mine

as we encircle the trunk,

almost eleven feet around.

Back to the lumber tables.

That one tree might make

three thousand feet of boards

if our hearts could stand

the sound of its fall.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Russell Libby, whose most recent book is "Balance: A Late Pastoral," Blackberry Press, 2007. Reprinted from "HeartLodge," Vol. III, Summer 2007, by permission of Russell Libby. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation.  The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.  We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts. 

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