Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Jules: Today is full of specialness.

Know how on the first Sunday of each month, 7-Imp usually features a student illustrator or an illustrator otherwise new to the field? Well, not today. We’re gonna shake things up this morning and celebrate National Poetry Month with a handful of visiting poets, as well as a bit of art. (OF COURSE. Gotta have art.) In fact, featured here is Julie Paschkis’ poetry-month poster, which you may have also seen at Jama’s wonderful blog this week. (And that’s because Jama and I are sometimes psychic brain twins.) Many thanks to Julie for sharing. If you missed her interview, posted about this time last year, by all means, go have a look. Her art makes me very happy.

And who are our visiting poets today, who are going to share some never-seen-before poetry here to help us celebrate a month of poems, poems, and more poems? Well, they are Douglas Florian (who will be stopping by this week for a breakfast interview), Sara Lewis Holmes, Julie Larios (whose new poem is featured above), Kelly Fineman, Elaine Magliaro, and Adam Rex. Let’s get right to it, and I thank them for celebrating with us this week, especially since several of these poems were written specifically for today’s celebration.

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I am madly and truly and deeply in love with this illustration, Chris Raschka’s depiction of the Jabberwock (and the “beamish boy” who slays him). You can click on the image to see it along with the classic Lewis Carroll poem, as it appears in A Foot in the Mouth: Poems to Speak, Sing, and Shout, released last month by Candlewick. My poem for today is also from this title, but I’ll get to that in a second.

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I know I tend to run on a bit about how much I love my newly-adopted city. Ithaca is a good fit for someone like me – it manages to pull off a friendly small-town homey feel with walk-the-walk social consciousness and an unabashedly intellectual core. But the longer I’ve lived here, the more I’ve come to realize it’s even more complicated than that. Layers upon layers. For instance, you’ve all heard me rave about the abundant natural beauty we’ve got going on:

But then we also have this:

This is the long-defunct Ithaca Gun Company factory. It was empty for years before being condemned in 2006, and after long discussions of how to deal with all the toxic chemicals it’s been leeching into the ground and river, demolition finally began last month.

My friend Justin Souza, one of the Poets Upstairs, has written a poem about the dual nature of our fair city. It’s called “Scenes from Other Summers,” and it was published this month in Oak Bend Review. Here’s how it starts:

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This is not a political blog. Or a current events blog. Or even a “here’s Jules and Eisha’s opinions on random stuff” blog. It’s supposed to be, as the byline says, a blog about books.

Okay. But.

Yesterday, as you may have heard, the Taliban bombed the shrine of Sufi poet Rahman Baba in Pakistan. They had warned the locals that the shrine would be destroyed if women continued to visit it, because doing so “promotes obscenity.”

I wanted to call attention to this evil by posting some of Rahman Baba’s poetry today. It turns out it’s hard to find much of his stuff translated into English online, and what I did find… well, honestly, it didn’t quite do it for me.

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There’s this book. It’s called The Cuckoo’s Haiku: And Other Birding Poems (Candlewick). It was written by the very prolific Michael J. Rosen and illustrated with remarkable grace by Stan Fellows and will be released very, very soon — in March. This poetry volume is designed to be not unlike a field notebook on birds — twenty-four North American birds from the Eastern Bluebird to the Dark-Eyed Junco — divided by seasons, starting with Spring and ending with Winter. (The Pileated Woodpecker opens this post.) A spare, evocative haiku from the mind and observant eye of Rosen accompanies each bird (“first feeders at dawn / paired like red quotation marks / last feeders at dusk” is the entry for the Northern Cardinal), as well as lush and—there’s no other word for it—beautiful watercolors from Fellows of these birds in their habitats that just shimmer right off the page. (His illustrations even include Rosen’s ardent notes about these creatures of the air. My favorites are on the American Goldfinch spreads: “travel in small groups, feeder is a tower of gold” and “funny — their song is ‘potato-chips, potato-chips.'”)

It’s a thing of beauty, this book.

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It’s prose, not poetry. I’m sorry. But for some reason this passage from Norman Maclean’s story “A River Runs Through It” popped into my head the other day and won’t leave me alone. So, think of it as a prose poem, and enjoy.

This excerpt is at the end of the story, where Norman and his father are talking about his brother’s death:

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My husband and I have finally made our way to season six, the final season, of The Sopranos. Today’s Poetry Friday entry is inspired by a poem one of the characters on the show reads to another character in one of the early episodes of this season, which we watched just the other night. I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone (though I know we’re slow in getting to the show and the rest of the country has seen it, I’m sure), so I won’t name names, but it may or may not have been during an existential crisis of sorts that one of the characters was having. In fact, this character was experiencing his own visions of life after death when the poem was being read.

Now, I am convinced that I think about life after death more than a person should (not in a morbid way, but in an enormously curious way) and that I’m, likely, terribly abnormal in this regard (as in, a total weirdo). But to me, it’s Life’s Greatest Mystery, and I think one reason I don’t mind aging at all in this wild life is that, each day, I’m one step closer to finding out the big answer. To say I claim to have no answers on the matter is a big ‘ol understatement, but I hope the atheists are wrong and that, in the words of Peter Pan, to die will be an awfully big adventure. All of that is to say that, well…you give me a book or a movie or a whatever that deals with the issue in an intelligent way, and I’m so hooked. This is one reason the poem really intrigued me. The character only reads the first two lines of the poem before the camera cuts away (to the other character’s ongoing journey through what you figure out is his own afterlife — not that he necessarily stays there, mind you), but my interest was piqued nonethless. (And the first show of this season opens with William Burroughs’ spoken word recording, Seven Souls, which was OH MY a TERRIFICALLY captivating way to open a season, but that’s a Poetry Friday entry for another day.)

Jacques Prévert—who wrote this poem, who is pictured here, who was born at the turn of the last century, and who is new to me—was a French poet and screenwriter. Evidently, he was an active participant in the Surrealist movement and also often wrote of sentimental love, even creating poems that were eventually set to music by the likes of not only many French vocalists, but also folks like Joan Baez.

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Wasn’t it nice to have poetry during the inauguration again? I thought so, too.

Do you know who the first President to have poetry read during the inauguration ceremony was? John F. Kennedy. And in case you didn’t know who he chose, it was Robert Frost. A natural choice, being a fellow New Englander and all. But – stop me if you’ve heard this before – there was kind of a hitch during the reading.

Frost had composed a poem especially for the occasion, titled “Dedication.” Here’s how it starts:

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Well, I’m excited about next week’s inauguration. How about you?

In celebration of poetry’s return to a presidential inauguration—this is the first time that poetry will be featured at the ceremony since Bill Clinton’s second swearing-in back in 1997—I’m featuring a poem by Elizabeth Alexander today. Alexander, Obama’s choice as the inaugural poet, is also an essayist, playwright, and teacher, born in New York City and raised in Washington, D.C. She has published five books of poetry and currently teaches in the Department of African American Studies at Yale University. As you can read here, she’s “completely thrilled and deeply, deeply honored” to have been chosen.

“…Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

to get from here to there…”

That’s from Alexander’s “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe,” and the full version can be found here at her site. Also of interest: Alexander’s “The female seer will burn upon this pyre,” archived over at The Poetry Foundation.

Lastly, this is well-worth your time: The Poetry Foundation’s 11/25/08 episode of Poetry Off the Shelf discusses “poets in the age of Obama,” or “how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry.” For approximately nine minutes (audio only), Curtis Fox discusses with Ms. Alexander how Obama will affect not only our current intellectual culture, but the world of poetry as well. Here’s the link.

As of Thursday night, I’m not sure who’s hosting the Poetry Friday round-up, but we’ll get it straight soon enough, I’m sure.

Friday-morning update: The round-up will be hosted by Karen Edmisten over at her blog with “the shockingly clever title.” Thanks for rounding-up, Karen!

Jone has some more thoughts on Ms. Alexander over at Check It Out.