Today was a day full of poetry for me: two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. Each session included a few poems as prompts. I especially enjoyed two of them. The first is a sort of praise poem, or ode, but presented in very plain, conversational language—straight reportage, no editorializing.
The Debate
by Alison Luterman
I’m listening to my father and his brother,
both in their eighties, debate their childhood
from adjoining La-Z-Boy recliners.
“We had no toys,” my father insists.
“What are you talking about, no toys?”
My uncle practically leaps from his chair,
except he can’t, on account of his back and his legs
and his feet and his hips. “We had tons of toys!”
Then he lists them: the playing cards
(“Those don’t count,” my father says);
the train set (“Oh, yeah, I forgot about the train set”);
the sleds—“Did anyone else on our block have sleds?”
Uncle Barry asks. “Nineteen-forty, people are crawling
out of the Great Depression on hands and knees, tell me:
Did anyone on our block besides us have a sled?”
My father’s father had a good job delivering newspapers
and brought home sixty-five dollars a week,
enough for Chinese food every Friday
and cupcakes on birthdays.
“We really didn’t have birthday parties,”
my father contends, and my uncle lunges at this.
“What are you talking about?
What about that surprise party
when you turned thirteen?”
“That was the only time,” my father counters.
Don’t even try, Uncle Barry, I almost say,
then catch myself. I want
this unwinnable argument to continue—
forever, if possible. I want
the Brooklyn music of their voices
entwined in a duet with no resolution. I want the song—
half lament, half celebration—
to go on and on and on.
The second was presented as exemplifying the statement that poetry is "language listening to itself." Of the four poems given for the prompt, the presenter said: "I sense these poets on expeditions for raucous emphatic music that sends them into the heart of the poems as they write them." Here's the first one, by the ever marvelous Seamus Heaney:
Death of a Naturalist
by Seamus Heaney
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst, into nimble
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
~~~~~
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