Dear Bibliophiles

On Sunday, January 3rd, Deborah Buchanan and Katie Radditz hosted a conversation about Favorite Women Poets on Zoom. We had a good turnout. It’s a big subject! They began talking about Japanese women poets:

 

Tankas from 4th – 19th century Japan

Ono no Komachi

     While, waiting for you,
     My heart is filled with longing,
     The autumn wind blows— 
     As if it were you— 
     Swaying the bamboo blinds of my door.

 

Tanka stresses the beauty of life and nature, but there is a strong feeling of yearning in many tanka. The shortness of life, the transient nature of seasons and love.

First known poetry perhaps is the tanka written as letters between women in Japan who were basically imprisoned at home.   They started writing letters to one another in simple haiku with hidden messages,  the recipient would write back in two lines. Forming a tanka from the Haiku. 

Izumi Shikibu. author of The Diary of Izumi Shikibu and was considered to be the finest poet of the time. She also wrote The Tale of Genji  considered the first novel. It is full of hundreds of Tankas.  

 

“To the lonely nights

when a robe comes between us,

would you then, you say,

have me add more layers yet

to keep us further apart?”

 

“Without showing a change in colour

The thing that fades

In this world

Is the flower

Called the human heart.”

 

“The colour of the cherry blossom

Has faded vainly

In the long rain

While in idle thoughts

I have spent my life.”

 

“Without a thought

For my black hair’s disarray

I throw myself down,

Already longing for the one

Who ran his fingers through it.“

 

“On the bamboo leaves

A fine ice fall

Patters and patters.

How bitter

To try to sleep alone!”

 

Then, Deborah and Katie talked about Emily Dickinson. They read this poem:

 

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

 

Johnny recited one of his favorite Emily Dickinson poems:

 

The Infinite a sudden Guest

Has been assumed to be —

But how can that stupendous come

Which never went away?

 

Deborah talked about Diane Di Prima and read this poem by her:

 

Poem in Praise of My Husband

 

I suppose it hasn’t been easy living with me

either,

with my piques, and ups and downs, my need for

privacy

leo pride and weeping in bed when you’re

trying to sleep

and you, interrupting me in the middle of a

thousand poems

in the middle of our drive over the nebraska

hills and

into colorado, odetta singing, the whole world

singing in me

the triumph of our revolution in the air

me about to get that down, and you

you saying something about the carburetor

so that it all went away

but we cling to each other

as if each thought the other was the raft

and he adrift alone, as in this mud house

not big enough, the walls dusting down around us, a fine dust rain

counteracting the good, high air, and stuffing

our nostrils

we hang our pictures of the separate worlds:

new york college and san francisco posters

set out our japanese dishes, chinese knives

hammer small indian marriage cloths into

the adobe

we stumble thru silence into each other’s gut

blundering thru from one wrong place to the

next

like kids who snuck out to play on a boat

at night

and the boat slipped from its moorings, and

they look at the stars

about which they know nothing, to find out

where they are going.

 

Deborah and Katie shared this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye: 

 

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

 

 Nancy Yeilding read this poem by Barbara Crooker:

 

It’s Monday Morning

 

mid-November, the world turned golden, 
preserved in amber. I should be doing more 
to save the planet—plant a tree, raise 
a turbine, put solar panels on the roof 
to grab the sun and bring it inside. Instead, 
I’m sitting here scribbling, sitting on a wrought 
iron chair, the air cold from last night’s frost, 
the thin sunlight sinking into the ruined 
Appalachians of my spine. I know it’s all 
about to fall apart; the signs are everywhere. 
But on this blue morning, the air bristling 
with crickets and birdsong, I do the only thing 
I can: put one word in front of the other, 
and see what happens when they rub up against 
each other. It might become something 
that will burst into flame. 

 

Dave Duncan read the first two stanzas of “The Cry of the Children” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

 

 

Here’s a poem from Wisława Szymborska that Katie and Deborah chose:

 

Possibilities

 I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

 

And here’s a poem by Wisława Szymborska that Jude Russell read:

 

The Three Oddest Words

 

 

Jeffrey Sher read a poem by Mary Oliver:

 

Wild Geese

 

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

 

Here a poem by Ada Limon:

 

The Raincoat

 

When the doctor suggested surgery
and a brace for all my youngest years,
my parents scrambled to take me
to massage therapy, deep tissue work,
osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine
unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,
and move more in a body unclouded
by pain. My mom would tell me to sing
songs to her the whole forty-five minute
drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-
five minutes back from physical therapy.
She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered
by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,
because I thought she liked it. I never
asked her what she gave up to drive me,
or how her day was before this chore. Today,
at her age, I was driving myself home from yet
another spine appointment, singing along
to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,
and I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

 

Nancy Yeilding didn’t know if she could get through this poem by Denise Levertov without crying. She was encouraged to give it a try:

 

The Fountain

Don’t say, don’t say there is no water
to solace the dryness at our hearts.
I have seen
 
the fountain springing out of the rock wall
and you drinking there. And I too
before your eyes

found footholds and climbed
to drink the cool water.
 
The woman of that place, shading her eyes,
frowned as she watched-but not because
she grudged the water,

only because she was waiting
to see we drank our fill and were
refreshed.

 Don’t say, don’t say there is no water.
That fountain is there among its scalloped
green and gray stones,

 it is still there and always there
with its quiet song and strange power
to spring in us,

 up and out through the rock.

 

Here’s a poem by Gabriela Mistral, the first Latin American to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature:

 

Riches 

I have a faithful fortune
and a fortune lost.
One’s like a rose,
the other a thorn.
What was taken from me
I still possess:
the faithful fortune
and the fortune lost,
and I’m rich in purple
and unhappiness.
Oh how I love the rose
and how the thorn loves me!
Like round twin apples
after the frost:
the faithful fortune,
the fortune lost.

 

(tr. Ursula K. Le Guin)

 

Here’s a poem by our current national Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo:

 

Perhaps the world ends Here

 

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

 

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

 

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it. 

 

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

 

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

 

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

 

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

 

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

 

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

 

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

 

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

*

 

Nancy Yeilding also recommends:

 

“Late August” by Mary Chivers

“For a Friend Lying in Intensive Care Waiting for Her White Blood Cells to Rejuvenate After a Bone Marrow Transplant”  by Barbara Crooker

“A Gift” and “Witness” by Denise Levertov

 

Deborah and Katie also recommend:

 

“A New National Anthem” by Ada Limon

“Sweetness,”  “Give Me Your Hand” and “Song of Death” by Gabriela Mistral

“Some People” by Wisława Szymborska

“The Burying Beetle” by Ada Limon

 

Deborah asked me to add this:

 

 

There were lots more poems! You shoulda been there! Maybe you were.

 

Deborah recently published three books of poetry: The World A Well, Layers of Sediment and Moment Before. You can order them from her at: dlbadger@gmail.com. 

 

We ended our Zoom gathering with Deborah reading one of her unpublished poems:

 

Unannounced

 

The grass moved

inhalation exhalation

as the animal slept

still but for breath

covered by the sky’s night

wind in the orchard

deeper shadows under dark firs

 

We find the grass bowl

in early morning, still warm

stalks flattened not by wind

but impress of being

a nest one might say

yet in soil not air

a vibrant emptiness

 

While we slept unaware

another life another world

passed by

inextricably connected

yet unknown

how many each moment

these transparent threads

 

Breathing the same air

walking so closely