Sunday Poetry XL -- "The Third Coast," 1979

There is no more sure-fire way to ensure the "datedness" of a book than subtitling it, in part, with the word "contemporary," in this case, "Contemporary Michigan Poetry," another book, very much like You've Been Told, from a couple weeks ago, that I have (didn't buy, but inherited) but haven't read.  So, today, I will peruse the collection and, in real time, randomly choose three poems.  Here they are, contemporary or not, in all the glory (your thoughts are welcome):

Death and the Pineapple

Dan Gerber, pp 57-58

The fruit itself a giant pinecone

Texture of an apple     the taste

An apple flavored with pine

If I died I couldn’t eat pineapples

Couldn’t slice them with a large knife

Or say the word that conjures the taste

Pie-napple     pine-apple

Couldn’t run my hands

Down the rough sides

Or over the bushy top

Let its juice drizzle down my chin

Or wipe it away

With the back of my hand

Rub it in my hair     gargle it

Ponder the origin of its name

Throw it at a strange and beautiful

Woman on the rue Saint-Jacques

Imagine a trip to Hawaii

The pineapple

Is what we give up when we die

Along with strawberries     coffee and sun

The room hovers about me

One more skull

The trees around the house

The sky around the tree

The stars around the sky

How could I escape so many enclosures

What would I see

What tastes     what sins

And if existence exists in space

What space     I can’t imagine nothing

A house I once visited

Had a pineapple over the door

A pineapple over the newel post

A pineapple in the center of the table

Surely these people had lived

They said it was their family crest

My sign     my life

A galaxy of pineapples

I considered all the pineapples

Growing under the sun

And will enjoy the good of my labor

All the days of my pineapple

For there is a wicked man

Who prolongeth his pineapple

In his wickedness

And not a just man on earth

That doeth good and sinneth not

In the Winter of Tigers

Tom McKeown, p150

In the winter of tigers,

After the zoo closes, the sun

Smokes and thins out, seeds

Leap from an apple’s core,

Wheat whispers loudly

To the earth, to startled snow.

A crow plummets

Through the calm sky

Like a black parachute

That never opens.

In the middle of winter, the tigers

Walk up the snowy mountains

And spread out with the snow,

Until there is only snow and tigers,

And the memories of tigers,

Invisible against the snow.

At St. Mary’s for the Aged

Eve Shelnutt, p235

She thinks God wants a wife.

She would like to lie with Him.

Would He make her pretty,

Or take her as she is?

Where, around Him, do the arms go?

The jealous Sisters see her rise;

Their hands cross on the door.

She dies and, dead,

Is not denied.

The Sisters lifting bones

Are satisfied.

Sunday Poetry XI -- TIGERS: GRR

SIRENS, TIGERS, and DREAMS, OH MY! and monsters too.

thank you: Chelsea Art Museum

Yeah, yeah.  I know.  Corny.  Hackneyed.  Irresistible.  But if you disregard the first of the trio, then it's likely smackingly obvious where this post is going, and, well, since the sirens really don't have that much to do with it, probably it is.

Francisco de Goya said, or painted really, "THE DREAM OF REASON BEGETS MONSTERS," in his etching to the right, and certainly in his head it did, and he painted them for the world to see.  Monsters is not a new topic here at The Wall, and I am not (thank me later) going to bore you by getting into it again.  The point isn't the monster, but the dream that produces it.  Perhaps all of us, rational or not, yet beget monsters--more or less monstrous--through our dreams.

Consider the first four stanzas of Margaret Atwood's "Siren Song" (taking the poetry's intent likely far from its originally intended context):

This is the one song everyone

would like to learn: the song

that is irresistible:

the song that forces men

to leap overboard in squadrons

even though they see the beached skulls

the song nobody knows

because anyone who has heard it

is dead, and the others can't remember.

Shall I tell you the secret

and if I do, will you get me

out of this bird suit?

(I wonder if the deliberate removal from context and subsequent application of a quotation is anything like the deliberate and maligned censoring of an author's published words.  If so, I am guilty, guilty, guilty.)

Goya

Good poetry is like a dot-to-dot in one of those coloring/activity books I buy my kids to keep them quiet in church.  The dots, obviously as there but the connecting of them is left to the reader.  While I'm in no way claiming any of this (my words) as poetry, much less good poetry, I am leaving the majority of dot-connecting to you--one poem, quotation, and painting to the next--partially because I think the connections are more profound that way, but mostly because my kids just went to bed (which really means things are supposed to be quiet but they aren't--at all) and I'm having a really hard time focusing long enough to articulate the shortest and most menial of my thoughts.

One of my favorite poems to use in my English classroom, and quite a classic, is "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" (below), by Adrienne Rich.  It's a great poem, and it's a perfect one to teach because of its abundant use of classic (and by "classic," here, I mean all the required stuff that shows up all over state boards of education English curricula) poetic devices.  All that aside, sure the poem is beautiful, but pay attention to the tigers, the dreaminess, and how, really, they're indeed monsters from the dreams of a rational or reasonable mind:

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid. 

Now put that together with “Dreamtigers,” by another of my all-time favorites, the great Jorge Luis Borges (seriously, if you like any of the stuff we talk about here at The Wall and you haven’t read this guy yet, get with the program!):

In my childhood I was a fervent worshiper of the tiger—not the jaguar, that spotted “tiger” that inhabits the floating islands of water hyacinths along the Parana’ and the tangled wilderness of the Amazon, but the true tiger, the striped Asian breed that can be faced only by men of war, in a castle atop an elephant.  I would stand for hours on end before one of the cages at the zoo; I would rank vast encyclopedias and natural history books by the splendor of their tigers.  (I still remember those pictures, I who cannot recall without error a woman’s brow or smile.)  My childhood outgrown, the tigers and my passion for them faded, but ther are still in my dreams.  In that underground sea or chaos, they still endure.  As I sleep I am drawn into some dream or other, and suddenly I realize that it’s a dream.  At those moments, I often think: This is a dream, a pure diversion of my will, and since I have unlimited power, I am going to bring forth a tiger.

            Oh, incompetence!  My dreams never seen to engender the creature I so hunger for.  The tiger does appear, but it is all dried up, or it’s flimsy-looking, or it has impure vagaries of shape or an unacceptable size, or it altogether too ephemeral, or it looks more like a dog or bird than like a tiger.

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There is another piece of lit that I think qualifies, potentially, as part of this dot-to-dot, but it's bigger than I've got space her to include, a children's story, frequently banned, entitled, Little Black Sambo. Here’s the link (HERE – scroll down to the story), and then here, too, is the old movie.

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