8/31/2009



American Life in Poetry: Column 232

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


I’ve built many wren houses since my wife and I moved to the country 25 years ago. It’s a good thing to do in the winter. At one point I had so many extra that in the spring I set up at a local farmers’ market and sold them for five dollars apiece. I say all this to assert that I am an authority at listening to the so small voices that Thomas R. Smith captures in this poem. Smith lives in Wisconsin.


Baby Wrens’ Voices

I am a student of wrens.
When the mother bird returns
to her brood, beak squirming
with winged breakfast, a shrill
clamor rises like jingling
from tiny, high-pitched bells.
Who’d have guessed such a small
house contained so many voices?
The sound they make is the pure sound
of life’s hunger. Who hangs our house
in the world’s branches, and listens
when we sing from our hunger?
Because I love best those songs
that shake the house of the singer,
I am a student of wrens.

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 ©2005 by Thomas R. Smith, whose most recent book of poetry is Waking Before Dawn, Red Dragonfly Press, 2007. Poem reprinted from the chapbook Kinnickinnic, Parallel Press, 2008, by permission of Thomas R. Smith and the publisher. The poem first appeared in There is No Other Way to Speak , the 2005 "winter book" of the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, ed., Bill Holm. Introduction copyright © 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.

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

8/24/2009



American Life in Poetry: Column 231

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


This column originates on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and at the beginning of each semester, we see parents helping their children move into their dorm rooms and apartments and looking a little shaken by the process. This wonderful poem by
Sue Ellen Thompson of Maryland captures not only a moment like that, but a mother’s feelings as well.



Helping My Daughter Move into Her First Apartment

This is all I am to her now:
a pair of legs in running shoes,

two arms strung with braided wire.
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs

at me and I accept it gladly, lifting
with my legs, not bending over,

raising each foot high enough
to clear the step. Fortunate to be

of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed,

with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me,

sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner,
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks

of rice and lentils slumped
against my heart: up one flight

of stairs and then another,
down again with nothing in my arms


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 ©2006 by Sue Ellen Thompson, and reprinted from "When She Named Fire," ed., Andrea Hollander Budy, Autumn House Press, 2009, and reprinted by permission of the poet and publisher. First printed in "The Golden Hour," Sue Ellen Thompson, Autumn House Press, 2006. Introduction copyright ©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.

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

8/17/2009



American Life in Poetry: Column 230

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


It’s been sixty-odd years since I was in the elementary grades, but I clearly remember those first school days in early autumn, when summer was suddenly over and we were all perched in our little desks facing into the future. Here Ron Koertge of California gives us a glimpse of a day like that.

First Grade

Until then, every forest
had wolves in it, we thought
it would be fun to wear snowshoes
all the time, and we could talk to water.

So why is this woman with the gray
breath calling out names and pointing
to the little desks we will occupy
for the rest of our lives?



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 ©2008 by Ron Koertge, whose most recent book of poems is "Fever," Red Hen Press, 2006. Reprinted by permission of Ron Koertge. Introduction copyright ©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.

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

8/13/2009




by Andrea Potos


FEELING LIKE A BUDDHIST

WHILE WATCHING THE CABLE TV PUNDIT


Same old

ash and smoke seething

from his mouth, his ears,

same old rock shards flung

at the opposing wing.


This time, my own volcanic

inclinations

don’t bubble or stir.

I smell no sulfur in the air.


For this moment,

such obsidian calm.

8/10/2009



American Life in Poetry: Column 229

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

For over forty years, Mark Vinz, of Moorhead, Minnesota--poet, teacher, publisher--has been a prominent advocate for the literature of the Upper Great Plains. Here’s a recent poem that speaks to growing older.


Cautionary Tales

Beyond the field of grazing, gazing cows
the great bull has a pasture to himself,
monumental, black flanks barely twitching
from the swarming flies. Only a few strands of
wire separate us--how could I forget
my childhood terror, the grownups warning
that the old bull near my uncle’s farm
would love to chase me, stomp me, gore me
if I ever got too close. And so I
skirted acres just to keep my distance,
peeking through the leaves to see if he still
was watching me, waiting for some foolish move--
those fierce red eyes, the thunder in the ground--
or maybe that was simply nightmares. It’s
getting hard to tell, as years themselves keep
gaining ground relentlessly, their hot breath
on my back, and not a fence in sight.


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 ©2008 by Mark Vinz, whose most recent book of poems is "Long Distance," Midwestern Writers Publishing House, 2006. Poem reprinted from "South Dakota Review" Vol. 46, no. 2, by permission of Mark Vinz and the publisher. Introduction copyright ©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.

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

8/09/2009




by Kelly Madigan Erlandson


Earth Behind Me, Blue and Bright


Reject the tunnel told by others,

the finish of radiant beams, the beloved

escort, the arms of mother.

Let imagination be the vehicle for dying.

Let’s say it is a dog shaking water from her coat,

who wets the clothes of those who stand here, crying.

Or maybe it could be the campfire’s sound

when the men who built it rise to move along

and douse it from above. Or a song sung in rounds

that always begins again as soon as it is ending.

A crate of pheasants hatched and old enough

to be released into the fields. We think of it as sending,

the way we get from one place to another,

the transport of the special DNA or Higher Self

we picture as eternal. It could be a hand that smothers

or a tamping down until we can’t be found.

We want a grander place, the brush with God!

But at the grave we cannot help but eye the mound

of dirt, though it is covered by a tarp, and worry

over its weight and density. Let’s say the end

is clay mixing with water, a slurry

of our insoluble parts. Or the church bells

just before the clapper strikes. A lowering

of rope into a cavern, the smell

of minerals, the wheeze of your own breath.

It’s opening a book, or falling forward,

it’s death biting the tail of its own death.


-originally appeared in Apalachee Review


8/08/2009





by David Graham


Self-Portrait as Lucky Man


Because I pay my bills on time

and often smile when signing checks

my credit limit’s been raised again.


I’m looking better and better

these days in the bathroom mirrors

of interstate highway rest stops --


my pallor and road-dazzled eyes

lend me the cool intelligence

of actors in foreign movies


where no one completes a sentence.

And though I cannot find a job

I’m the kind of man you would think


should have no trouble. Yesterday

my car stalled at a traffic light

in time to avoid being hit


by an escaping felon’s truck.

Even when I lower my eyes

in pain or shyness I’m sure to glimpse


five-dollar bills in the gutter.

My wife is so kind I do not

deserve her, though she swears I do.


-from Second Wind. Texas Tech University Press, 1990.