Here it is more than halfway through April and I’m just now getting around to waxing poetic about the 30 days that have been designated as poetry month. I think I know why we gave the nod to our fourth swing around the sun as I observe the pale green leaves plumping the skeletons of trees and the spastic fluttering of backyard birds in love. If ever a person would be inspired to compose some verse, this would do it.
As for me, I’ve been reading Shakespeare. Rereading Hamlet, to be precise, in advance of attending the recent adaptation Fat Ham at the Seattle Rep. But that’s a play, not a poem, you say. And why read it? Everybody knows the story of that crazy prince. Well, yes, but I took it as an opportunity to revisit the amazing word play of the Bard.
Play It
I don’t expect Fat Ham, which the Rep says is set at a family barbecue in the southern U.S., to deliver the lines to this Pulitzer Prize-winning “uproarious new comedy” in iambic pentameter. (Congratulations to writer James Ijames for that 2022 Pulitzer, and the Broadway success with this play that earned it a 2023 Tony nomination!)
I imagine updated language will still reveal that the main character’s father has suffered an untimely recent death, his mother has married his uncle, and now his father’s ghost has appeared to tell him that his uncle was the murderer, and urge him to revenge, and he resolves to confirm the scheme and expose his uncle by revealing it in a play. Oops, spoiler alert! (I think you’re supposed to write that before you reveal the plot.)
No doubt I will delight in the way this new production will freshen the story. But in the original lives the pathos.
The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.
Written (and spoken) in that signature timing, which I’ve heard accurately compared to the beating of a heart, the poetic language sparkles.
There must be something in the air, because just the other night we watched an episode of the delightful Brokenwood Mysteries streaming on PBS in which the murder du jour occurred during a staging of…Hamlet. I won’t reveal this plot line—go find it and enjoy!
And then in the mail, I received my monthly poem-on-a-postcard.
Post It
At last year’s Association of Writers and Publishers conference in Seattle, I chanced upon a trade show booth by Hoot Review, a monthly literary magazine whose entire publishing operation is printed monthly on one postcard. Hoot’s motto is “‘Brevity is the soul of wit’ and of other things too.” (Thanks again, Hamlet!) So I signed up, how could I not? And now, every month, nestled amongst the monstrously tedious stack of mail comes a slight card, hand-addressed, with a poem (or sometimes prose) asking for my brief attention.
I will share a bit of April’s poem, Hoot’s Issue 143, “First Love” by Rebecca Ahn:
She was the gum and I was the pavement, and I couldn’t scrape her off my heart.
Sign on for your own postcards and learn how the rest of the love story unfolded, on an ocean beach.
I studied Shakespeare in college, a two-semester course as I recall, where we worked our way through each and every play, and also read the narrative poems, and also tried to explicate every one of the sonnets, all 154 of them.
My heart was pounding in iambic verse
The beat that college year threatened to curse
Sing It
I was writing a bit of poetry myself then, trying out different styles. In fact, poetry was what had gotten me into this writing, um, thing. My first published work was a short poem printed in my high school newspaper (thank you Editor Sheila Key for giving me my big break!). It was called “The Crowd,” in which the poet urged his readers to all agree to embrace individualism. Might as well swing for the fences, right?
In college and after, I had a few poems printed in literary magazines run by friends, and even one, featuring a prairie chicken, that made the back cover of the state lifestyle magazine. If I happen upon one of those college poems today, I still mostly cannot understand what my 20-year-old self knew and was trying to convey with those lines. Perhaps I need more wisdom yet. Some future April, I’ll revisit them again.
Many people enjoy poetry on a daily basis but might not realize it. In the same way healthful nutrition is packed in a piece of sweet fruit, the poetry of popular song is sent out over the airwaves with a beat behind it. Nobel Laureate in Literature Bob Dylan practices it, as do so many others. Consider this lyric by one of my favorite songs by Tom Waits:
Well, you gassed her up
Behind the wheel
With your arm around your sweet one
In your Oldsmobile
Barrelling down the boulevard
You're looking for the heart of Saturday night
Well—as we’ve already established—for me it was a Pontiac. But how’s that for poetry?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.
Musical notes wheel by unseen, carrying evocative words on their shoulders. (Inspiration by songster and poet Jane Siberry.)
Cheer It
I have enjoyed the work of many more contemporary poets and support the publishers, like Port Townsend’s Copper Canyon Press, who get them into print. Jerico Brown was a recent discovery for me, opening my eyes with his powerful perspectives on humanity and equality. That press has published many more works from admirable authors, Theodore Roethke to Jim Harrison to Jorie Graham to Ocean Vuong. I am working my way through their history with last year’s publication “A House Called Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Poetry,” which is a treasure. I believe there’s even a second volume.
And I continue to treasure the work emanating from the poet laureate of my own family, Laurence Snydal. For many years his work has not only given me a perspective on my family and my own history, but also revealed the gentle soul of my uncle as a teacher, a musician, a lover of word play, an astute observer of the human condition. (He is collecting his poems (and recording audio for some of them) on his excellent website curated by his son Jon.)
Here is one of his poems, from his book Dakota, appropriate to the season:
Ice Breaking
Then rivers spoke in spring and the big Muddy
Ground out groans and chips and blocks. I’d lie in bed
In town and listen. Then the winter snowfield
Sagged and shivered and the geese repeated
Stanzas memorized before the slurry
And the slush had names. Now when I study
My old lists, old words, old wounds, I hear instead
The ranting of the river as it reeled
Inside itself and winter ways retreated
With the breakup of the ice on the Missouri.
Lagniappe
Go deep with Anis Mojgani, the Poet Laureate of Oregon, as he performs “Out of the Garden.”
And never forget the beloved former U.S. Poet Laureate, Billy Collins, here sharing “Forgetfulness”:
Bill! You may be the only true Renaissance man I know. Each of these newsletter posts are little gifts you are sending out into the world, and I’m so lucky to be one of the recipients! I loved the Billy Collins poem, which of course becomes more apt each day at age 64. I would like to request that you reprint the poem from high school. I wish I remembered it. People who didn’t grow up in small town North Dakota might not understand how radical a concept individuality was, at least back in the 70s. As someone who Instinctively railed against conformity, which made me a bit of an outcast, I am sure your poem must have resonated with me back then. Happy spring to you, Bill!