Maxine Kumin: In Memoriam

 Maxine Kumin died recently. We were friends for many years.

Snowshoeing in the Joppa Woods

In Memoriam: MK

Snowshoeing in the Joppa woods

in concave February light,

I feel slight as punctuation,

my bigfoot tracks so shallow

a breath would fill them behind me.

The hemlock are breathless, though,

and thrust their armfuls overhead

as if offering them to the sun.

At the end of this unplowed road

your barn-red farmhouse clutches

three hundred acres of forest

and one small frozen pond where

skinnydipping in hot weather

defies clouds of mosquitoes and flies.

I skimmed over that pond this morning

and flayed it with my sullen gait.

Your reading tour in the South

has left your farm in my keeping.

Caesar, your Dalmatian, follows me

in the hock-deep snow. We’re friends,

your dog and me. Our habits

revolve around eating and walking,

reading and target shooting,

and refusing to answer the phone.

You trust me with your possessions,

but I’ve never met your children,

grown in all directions, and doubt

that your husband recalls my name.

The woods smell sweet as a bakery.

The sizzle of my broad-based stride

topples the silence and comforts

the dog, who wonders where you’ve gone.                                   

Meanwhile in your best beige suit

you’re basting a college audience

in your crisp suburban soprano.

They’ve never seen a woman like you,

whose verse straddles its victims

with a sly aggressive confidence

and tugs at various organs

until the creature laughs or cries.                       

Caesar slogs along, resigned

to my company. The sun drops

below the crest of the Mink Hills,

the hemlocks droop as if flirting,

and the old Joppa graveyard

thrusts a few illegible slates

into a jeering blackish smile.

Merry Christmas

Cat shelter quiet on Christmas Day,

no one browsing to adopt.

A box of toys mailed from Carmel.

In Timmy’s Room the big guys

nose about. Bob the tough one,

cabbage-headed veteran. Midnight,

long-haired gloss. Mr. Peepers

with gray saddleback and crown.

But it’s Dewey who thrusts himself

headlong into the box to root

through the catnip confections,

his rump soaring, his tail aflame.

No need to rescue him. The box

topples off the sofa and spills.

The guys each grab a toy. Other cats

tumble into the rumpus and bat

cloth mice, plastic balls with bells,

and catnip-filled vegetable shapes.

Bare trees shrug at the window.

A bright day, the snow cover stretched

over brassy weeds beyond

the rutted parking lot. The cats

prattle around the room, grinning.

A canned food treat slopped on large

plastic trays confirms the day

as special enough to remember

if cats remember as people do—

a slur of overlapping snapshots

sparking in the grain of neurons,

fading into black and white.

Charles W. Pratt: poetry

Here's a review of an interesting collection you may not know about:

Charles W. Pratt, From the Box Marked Some Are Missing: New and Selected Poems. Brookline NH: Hobblebush Books, 2010. (www.hobblebush.com)

The opening poems, and many subsequent ones, in Charles Pratt’s new and selected poems reprise the voice, topics, and arguably the point of view of Robert Frost. “In the Woods” echoes parts of “The Wood-Pile,” “Learning to Prune” and “Spray and Pray” obliquely echo “After Apple-Picking” and “Good-Bye and Keep Cold,” and “Stones” reverberates with many of the poems in A Boy’s Will. Perhaps most startlingly, “May 15,” a much more recent poem, touches upon several of Frost’s early lyric poems and revisits one of his central themes, the question of whether the universe is an act of deliberation:

The time has come to revise

Line by line by line

The rough draft of my field

Till down the green grass lies

Obedient to design

And the lovely scruffy tufts

Of flowers, they too, must yield.

            But it would be a mistake to think of Pratt as merely a minor ephebe of a great poet. His poems come out of experience as well as imagination, out of actual farm work (in his case, an orchard) as well as out of reading Frost, George Herbert, and other poets important to him. He seized upon Frost not just as a congenial voice but as a body of experience comparable to his own efforts to support himself as an apple-grower in New Hampshire. He has grown through Frost, and has not let himself be stunted by influence. Many of his best poems—such as “O Say Can You See”—resemble the work of no one else:

Tonight the whole neighborhood gathered for the first night game

In the history of Thomas Tree stadium, brothers and sisters,

Parents, grandparents; hands over hearts we sang

“The Star-Spangled banner,” faltering only in places

Then played nine innings of laughter and arguments

With an umpire whose allegiance was transparently not to truth

But to beautiful symmetry, a tie game to the end.

These loose-limbed but graceful long lines are not his only resource. He produces an almost perfect sonnet (although it’s really only twelve lines) in “Band Concert in Regent’s Park” with its wonderful evocation of the Titanic concluding with “Why should we try to keep the ship afloat / Except for the pleasure of hearing the final note?” And in “Whatever it Was” he displays an enviable ear for the terser sort of free verse:

How she moved, moved, moved behind the counter,

Wiping it over and over

“To keep myself awake,” she said.

Pratt’s resources are not only prosodic, however. Poems like “Refuting Berkeley” display an ability to bring to bear the history of ideas on the present moment. Here the voice of the intellect crosscuts the voice of personal sentiment as the speaker observes his freshly born child, then muses on Johnson’s clumsy but dramatic refutation of Berkeley’s idealism. Although the poem ends with a self-effacement that precludes it from seeming showy, it illustrates Pratt’s cultural resources, which he handles effectively and in a different way from Frost, Yeats, Herbert, and other predecessors. Thoughtful beyond the abilities of many of his contemporaries, frankly indebted to some giants of the past, Pratt continues the great conversation of poetry in ways we as readers should honor and trust.

A Rejection from Robert Bly

In browsing through my books I found this rejection slip from Robert Bly. Even after some forty years it seems to me the most thoughtful and intelligent one I have ever received.

 

It reads: Dear Wm. Doreski, These don’t have the interior space that the short poem needs. They are written more with the prose intelligence—not enough senses in the language—than with the intuitive or animal intelligence. Don’t know if this makes sense to you or not. Yours Robert Bly.

This still seems to me a highly perceptive statement about poetry in general, and illuminates not only Bly's better poems but the work of the poets he has admired: Transtromer, Neruda, Vallejo, etc.