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“Rabbit Is Up to Tricks”

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Poet Joy Harjo

Born in 1951, Joy Harjo is a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Native American Nation, who has served three terms as poet laureate of the United States. Her poetry is simply magical, as the following sample shows:

Rabbit Is Up to Tricks

In a world long before this one, there was enough for everyone,
Until somebody got out of line.
We heard it was Rabbit, fooling around with clay and the wind.
Everybody was tired of his tricks and no one would play with him;
He was lonely in this world.
So Rabbit thought to make a person.
And when he blew into the mouth of that crude figure to see
What would happen,
The clay man stood up.
Rabbit showed the clay man how to steal a chicken.
The clay man obeyed.
Then Rabbit showed him how to steal corn.
The clay man obeyed.
Then he showed him how to steal someone else’s wife.
The clay man obeyed.
Rabbit felt important and powerful.
The clay man felt important and powerful.
And once that clay man started he could not stop.
Once he took that chicken he wanted all the chickens.
And once he took that corn he wanted all the corn.
And once he took that wife, he wanted all the wives.
He was insatiable.
Then he had a taste of gold and he wanted all the gold.
Then it was land and anything else he saw.
His wanting only made him want more.
Soon it was countries, and then it was trade.
The wanting infected the earth.
We lost track of the purpose and reason for life.
We began to forget our songs. We forgot our stories.
We could no longer see or hear our ancestors,
Or talk with each other across the kitchen table.
Forests were being mowed down all over the world.
And Rabbit had no place to play.
Rabbit’s trick had backfired.
Rabbit tried to call the clay man back,
But when the clay man wouldn’t listen
Rabbit realized he’d made a clay man with no ears.

“No Surprise”

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A short Emily Dickinson piece that shows that poetess from Amherst has, at times, ice in her veins and steel in her nerves.

Apparently with no surprise
To any happy flower,
The frost beheads it at its play
In accidental power.

The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved
To measure off another day
For an approving God.

Three Poets: Katie Farris

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Poet Katie Farris

One of my favorite poets at last weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was Katie Farris, who read from her works on Saturday, April 20, at the Poetry Stage. Her recently published collection—Standing in the Forest of Being Alive—brought together her experiences with third-stage breast cancer, the global Covid pandemic, and an America at the point of heading for a messy divorce. Here is her explanation of how it all came together:

What drew me to her poems was her debt to Emily Dickinson and William Blake, two of my all-time favorite poets. In fact, there is definitely something of Emily in her work—without the sometimes obscure wording that sends the reader back to the beginning to make sense of the poet “telling it slant.” Below is the first poem from her collection:

Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World

To train myself to find in the midst of hell
what isn’t hell.

The body bald
cancerous but still
beautiful enough to
imagine living the body
washing the body
replacing a loose front
porch step the body chewing
what it takes to keep a body
going—

This scene has a tune
a language I can read a door
I cannot close I stand
within its wedge
a shield.

Why write love poetry in a burning world?
o train myself in the midst of a burning world
to offer poems of love to a burning world.

Three Poets: Hala Alyan

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Poet Dr. Hala Alyan at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival

She is not only a poet and novelist, but also a clinical psychologist. As she read selections from her most recent poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back, Dr. Hala Anyan’s dark eyes flashed; her shock of brown curly hair fluttered in the breeze; and her voice modulated from quiet to powerful. She is a Palestinian-American born in Carbondale, Illinois. But her poems are never far from her ancestral home in a conflicted land.

Even as she read her poems, we heard the loud sounds of a demonstration at the University of Southern California (USC) loudly protesting the horrors of the Israelis’ revenge on the Palestinians. And now we hear that graduation ceremonies at USC have been put on hold during the crisis.

Naturalized

Can I pull the land from me like a cork?
I leak all over brunch. My father never learned to swim.
I won’t say where he was born. I’ve already said too much.
Look, the gardenias are coming in. Look, my love
is watching Vice again. Gloss and soundbites.
He likes to understand. He plays devil’s advocate.
My father plays soccer. It’s so hot in Gaza.
It’s so hot under that hospital elevator.
There’s no room for a child’s braid. In the staff meeting,
I stretch my teeth into a country
When they congratulate me on the ceasefire.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a coffin.
They like me when I spit my father from my mouth.
There’s a whistle. There’s a missile fist-bumping the earth.
I draw a Pantene map on the shower curtain.
I break a Klonopin* with my teeth and swim.
The newspaper says truce and C-Mart
is selling peaches again. Woolly in my palms.
I’ve marched on the street too few times.
I’ve ruined the dinner party with my politics.
Sundays are tarot days. Tuesdays are for tacos.
There’s a leak in the bathroom and I get it fixed
in thirty minutes flat. I stop jogging when I’m tired.
Nothing can justify why I’m alive. Why there’s still
a June. Why I wake and wake and the earth doesn’t shake.

” Klonopin – Clonazepam is a benzodiazepine. It is approved for the treatment of panic disorder (with or without agoraphobia), as well as certain types of seizure disorders.

Three Poets: Maggie Millner

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Poet Maggie Millner

It is no surprise that the three poets whose readings I most liked at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival Poetry Stage were all women. They represented three different life paths which, while typically feminine, were universal in their humanity.

The first is Maggie Millner, born in upstate New York, an instructor in writing at Yale University. The poem is from her poetry collection entitled Couplets.

1.12

There are many ways, of course,
of telling it. But each account obscures

some other version equally true.
One is that I lied to everyone I knew.

Another—this one I really do believe—
is that for years I loved him more than me.

I can conjure even now our first apartment’s tile:
white diamonds in their blue argyle

frieze around the sink, the dirty grout
I’d scour with a toothbrush while he was out

at work. I can count four bathmats
over eight years, hear the record player catch

every time we stood up from the table.
And I can still feel the invisible

moat we both lived in, on the other side of which
we knew lay torment, exile, wreckage,

the anarchy of singledom. Loss upon loss.
I remember testing it, the moat: throwing across

a rope to check its breadth, twice to the waist
wading in before retreating, shamefaced,

reining myself back. To him it was a sea
I think entirely impassable. To me

it was a dizzying ravine
that circled us for years, then cut between.

Where Reading Is Honored

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Yes, It Really Was That Crowded

After several consecutive wet weekends, this last weekend was ideal for a big get-together. And that’s exactly what happened at the campus of the University of Southern California (USC) where the 2024 edition of the Los Angeles Times Book Festival took place. I do not recall being in such a crowd scene for decades. In fact, it was so crowded that I couldn’t buy more than three books because the booths that interested me the most were jammed with people.

The only reason I could tolerate the crowds is that they were there honoring books and reading, which are sacred to me. Never mind that most of them read nothing but crap. The important thing is that they were coming together to honor an activity that is disappearing from our anti-intellectual culture.

This time I noticed for the first time that so many of the booths related to self-publishing. And, since no one ever heard of these authors, their booths were, for the most part, unvisited. Well, they are part of the publishing world, too, and with luck a handful of them may make it to the big time.

As with last year, I spent most of my time at the Poetry Stage, where there was a different poetry reading every twenty minutes. There, I made the acquaintance of three women poets I will be discussing later this week.

The one that got away, however, was the Salvadorean poet Yesika Salgado, who spoke at the Latinidad Stage in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. She was magnificent. I couldn’t buy her book because the line to buy a copy and have the poet sign it was approximately a hundred persons long; and I was by that time exhausted and ready to return home.

I guess I should have spent more time at the Latinidad Stage. Even though my Spanish is pretty punk, the people in attendance were into their poets in a big way, and Yesika is a real force on the L.A. literary scene, as this YouTube video will show:

The Swan

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French Poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

Today, as I was re-reading Patrick Modiano’s The Black Notebook (2012) with its labyrinthine reconstructions of an imperfectly remembered past, I thought of a poem by Charles Baudelaire that gave me the same feeling, It is called “The Swan”:

The Swan

I

Andromache, I think of you! The stream,
The poor, sad mirror where in bygone days
Shone all the majesty of your widowed grief,
The lying Simoïs flooded by your tears,
Made all my fertile memory blossom forth
As I passed by the new-built Carrousel.
Old Paris is no more (a town, alas,
Changes more quickly than man’s heart may change);
Yet in my mind I still can see the booths;
The heaps of brick and rough-hewn capitals;
The grass; the stones all over-green with moss;
The _débris_, and the square-set heaps of tiles.

There a menagerie was once outspread;
And there I saw, one morning at the hour
When toil awakes beneath the cold, clear sky,
And the road roars upon the silent air,
A swan who had escaped his cage, and walked
On the dry pavement with his webby feet,
And trailed his spotless plumage on the ground.
And near a waterless stream the piteous swan
Opened his beak, and bathing in the dust
His nervous wings, he cried (his heart the while
Filled with a vision of his own fair lake):
“O water, when then wilt thou come in rain?
Lightning, when wilt thou glitter?”
Sometimes yet
I see the hapless bird — strange, fatal myth —
Like him that Ovid writes of, lifting up
Unto the cruelly blue, ironic heavens,
With stretched, convulsive neck a thirsty face,
As though he sent reproaches up to God!

II

Paris may change; my melancholy is fixed.
New palaces, and scaffoldings, and blocks,
And suburbs old, are symbols all to me
Whose memories are as heavy as a stone.
And so, before the Louvre, to vex my soul,
The image came of my majestic swan
With his mad gestures, foolish and sublime,
As of an exile whom one great desire
Gnaws with no truce. And then I thought of you,
Andromache! torn from your hero’s arms;
Beneath the hand of Pyrrhus in his pride;
Bent o’er an empty tomb in ecstasy;
Widow of Hector — wife of Helenus!
And of the negress, wan and phthisical,
Tramping the mud, and with her haggard eyes
Seeking beyond the mighty walls of fog
The absent palm-trees of proud Africa;
Of all who lose that which they never find;
Of all who drink of tears; all whom grey grief
Gives suck to as the kindly wolf gave suck;
Of meagre orphans who like blossoms fade.
And one old Memory like a crying horn
Sounds through the forest where my soul is lost….
I think of sailors on some isle forgotten;
Of captives; vanquished … and of many more.

The translation is by F. P. Sturm.

“Prepare Yourselves”

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Maya King at Mérida’s Palacio Canton Museum

After being conquered by the Spanish, the Maya of Yucatán wrote a series of miscellanies in the 17th and 18th centuries referred to as Chilam Balam. Many of the entries are poetic and filled with foreboding. Poet Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno translated a number of them in his The Destruction of the Jaguar: Poems from the Books of Chilam Balam. Here is one of them:

Napuctum Speaks

Burn, burn, burn
on earth we shall burn
become cinders in
the blowing wind
drift over the land
over the mountains
out to sea.

What has been written
will be fulfilled.
What has been spoken
will come to be.

Weep, weep, weep
but know,
know well:
Ash does not suffer.

The Tiger at the Buenos Aires Zoo

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The Buenos Aires Zoo that Jorge Luis Borges visited to be inspired by its tigers was closed in 2016, five years after Martine and I visited it. Its former space in Palermo is now occupied by an EcoPark.

Although he became almost totally blind in the 1950s because of an ophthalmic ailment inherited from his father, Borges in his poetry returned again and again to the tigers he heard roaring in the old zoo.

Below is one of my favorites—“The Gold of the Tigers”—translated by Alastair Reid:

The Gold of the Tigers

Up to the moment of the yellow sunset,
how many times will I have cast my eyes on
the sinewy-bodied tiger of Bengal
to-ing and fro-ing on its paced-out path
behind the labyrinthine iron bars,
never suspecting them to be a prison.
Afterwards, other tigers will appear:
the blazing tiger of Blake, burning bright;
and after that will come the other golds—
the amorous gold shower disguising Zeus,
the gold ring which, on every ninth night,
gives light to nine rings more, and these, nine more,
and there is never an end.
All the other overwhelming colors,
in company with the years, kept leaving me,
and now alone remains
the amorphous light, the inextricable shadow
and the gold of the beginning.
O sunsets, O tigers, O wonders
of myth and epic,
O gold more dear to me, gold of your hair
which these hands long to touch.

In this poem, Borges refers to William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”; to the Greek myth of Zeus impregnating Danaë disguised as a shower of gold; and the Norse myth of Draupnir, the self-replicating gold ring. The only color Borges was able to see as his blindness worsened was yellow. Finally, the golden-haired beauty referred to at the end was probably Norah Lange, the Norwegian-Argentinian writer whom Borges loved but who chose to marry rival poet Oliverio Girondo instead.

“It Is Bells Within”

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Like me, Emily Dickinson loved reading. (Unlike me, she had the talent to show for it.) Today, I present one of her untitled poems on the joys of books.

Unto my books so good to turn
Far ends of tired days;
It half endears the abstinence,
And pain is missed in praise.

As flavors cheer retarded guests
With banquetings to be,
So spices stimulate the time
Till my small library.

It may be wilderness without,
Far feet of failing men,
But holiday excludes the night,
And it is bells within.

I thank these kinsmen of the shelf;
Their countenances bland
Enamour in prospective,
And satisfy, obtained.