Because You Asked about the Line Between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle That while you watched turned to pieces of snow  Riding a gradient invisible From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn’t tell. And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991)

Watch Howard Nemerov read his poem.

Traveling Light

I am only leaving you for a handful of days, but it feels as though I'll be gone forever— the way the door closes

behind me with such solidity, the way my suitcase carries everything I'd need for an eternity of traveling light.

I've left my hotel number  on your desk, instructions about the dog and heating dinner. But like the weather front

they warn is on its way with its switchblades of wind and ice, our lives have minds of their own.

Linda Pastan (1932-2023)

Such Is The Sickness Of Many A Good Thing

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?  hid away in the heat like wrath        conceald in Love’s face,  or the seed, Eris in Eros,        key and lock  of what I was?      I could not speak        the releasing  word.      For into a dark        matter he came  and askt me to say what        I could not say.      “I ..” 

All the flame in me stopt        against my tongue.  My heart was a stone, a dumb        unmanageable thing in me,  a darkness that stood athwart        his need  for the enlightening, the        “I love you” that has  only this one quick in time,        this one start  when its moment is true. 

Such is the sickness of many a good thing  that now into my life from long ago this  refusing to say I love you has bound  the weeping, the yielding, the        yearning to be taken again,  into a knot, a waiting, a string 

so taut it taunts the song,  it resists the touch. It grows dark  to draw down the lover’s hand  from its lightness to what’s        underground.

Such Is The Sickness Of Many A Good Thing

Was he then Adam of the Burning Way?  hid away in the heat like wrath        conceald in Love’s face,  or the seed, Eris in Eros,        key and lock  of what I was?      I could not speak        the releasing  word.      For into a dark        matter he came  and askt me to say what        I could not say.      “I ..” 

All the flame in me stopt        against my tongue.  My heart was a stone, a dumb        unmanageable thing in me,  a darkness that stood athwart        his need  for the enlightening, the        “I love you” that has  only this one quick in time,        this one start  when its moment is true. 

Such is the sickness of many a good thing  that now into my life from long ago this  refusing to say I love you has bound  the weeping, the yielding, the        yearning to be taken again,  into a knot, a waiting, a string 

so taut it taunts the song,  it resists the touch. It grows dark  to draw down the lover’s hand  from its lightness to what’s        underground.

Egrets

Some say beauty may be the egret in the field

who follows after the cows sensing slaughter—

but I believe the soul is neither air nor water, not

this winged thing nor the cattle who moan

to make themselves known. Instead, the horses

standing almost fifteen hands high— like regret they come

most the time when called. Hungry, the greys eat

from your palm, tender-toothed— their surprising

plum-dark tongues flashing quick & rough as a match—

striking your hand, your arm, startled into flame.

Kevin Young

Watch Kevin Young read this poem from his collection Stones.

This Is a Photograph of Me

It was taken some time ago. At first it seems to be a smeared print: blurred lines and grey flecks blended with the paper;

then, as you scan it, you see in the left-hand corner a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree (balsam or spruce) emerging and, to the right, halfway up what ought to be a gentle slope, a small frame house.

In the background there is a lake,  and beyond that, some low hills.

(The photograph was taken the day after I drowned.

I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.

It is difficult to say where  precisely, or to say how large or small I am: the effect of water  on light is a distortion

but if you look long enough,  eventually you will be able to see me.)

Margaret Atwood

Elegy as a message left on an answering machine

Hello, you've reached 542-0306. I'm unable to answer the phone just now, but just leave a message after the beep and I'll be sure to return your call      Goodbye for now.      ______________

Won't bother waiting up for you to get back to me on this one. Waste of time. My dime in a bar by the water, your factory-new

answering machine is—like anything bereaved—still full of your words, the waves of your voice, the nervous laugh that gave us, sometimes, "cause" to laugh. And which we now miss. Well,

human nature. I say Fuck my own. I own up: this stinks. Too late to erase all the crap, a watergate of gossip, off-hand words, no time to phone-

in those last minute changes, additions, to say what we find it so impossible to say— I find. So cut all this can't come to the phone right now cant, I don't

buy it, I figure you're in there somewhere, still screening your calls, you secretive bastard, pick up the phone right now if you would hear a friend. Don't stall,

don't, like me. Thinking there's time, there's still time enough, or rather not thinking enough. Now look, I'm not sure whether the executors will be disconnecting

you—your line — tomorrow (nurses, almost, pulling closed the green curtain and tearing out of your torso the drips and plugs and electrodes to leave you drifting

with that astronaut in the film who squirms awhile, signals some last, frantic word then spins away into the void)— that's why I'm here. Sky's clear tonight, by the way, calm

the wind, the water. Not sure really why I called— gesture of a drunk old friend and ally.

Anyway, it was pretty good for a second or two, to get through, Tom,

goodbye.

Steven Heighton (1961-2022)

Steven Heighton writes: The poem was inspired by the death, in 1993, of my friend Tom Marshall, an older writer who lived a few blocks from me here in Kingston and who had read and critiqued and encouraged me since the mid-eighties, when I started to write poems...The poem is written in slant-rhymed quatrains, generally in a nesting pattern (abba, cddc). But I’ve taken the liberty of varying the pattern when necessary, instead of getting out the shears and the shoehorn. So stanza four (aabb) and stanza seven (cbcb) follow a different scheme. As for metre, I’ve given myself complete freedom, allowing my instincts and emotion to dictate the flow of the line...I wanted to use a somewhat constraining form for this poem as a counterpoise to the strong emotion that fuelled it. Not that the form is meant to deaden the emotion. Just the opposite: it should intensify it by means of compression. In the end—like a bottle of wine left overnight in a car in the dead of winter—the contained liquor of the poem should burst open the container. 

Ajar

The washing-machine door broke.     We hand-washed for a week. Left in the tub to soak,     the angers began to reek, And sometimes when we spoke,     you said we shouldn't speak. Pandora was a bride; the     gods gave her a jar But said don't look inside.     You know how stories are— The can of worms denied?     It's never been so far. Whatever the gods forbid,     it's sure someone will do, And so Pandora did,     and made the worst come true. She peeked under the lid,     and out all trouble flew: Sickness, war, and pain,     nerves frayed like fretted rope, Every mortal bane     with which Mankind must cope. The only thing to remain,     lodged in the mouth, was Hope. Or so the tale asserts—     and who am I to deny it? Yes, out like black-winged birds     the woes flew and ran riot, But I say that the woes were words,     and the only thing left was quiet.

A. E. Stallings

Watch A. E. Stallings introduce and read her poem (34:58)

A. E. Stallings writes: "Ajar" was written while I was translating Hesiod's Works and Days, an archaic Greek poem-cum-almanac about justice and farming, chores and the seasons. It also contains a story about the first woman, Pandora, and is the first telling of Pandora and the Jar... This poem came out of three aspects of my life at once—real frustration with a broken machine and a certain kind of uninspiring work, the tendency to look at that work through poetry, trying to make something out of that frustrated daily-ness, and simultaneously thinking through the problems of translation and interpretation... The decision to title the poem "Ajar" came rather late. It was true that the washing-machine door (of an upright machine) was wedged ajar and couldn't close, so that word was in the air. Puns sometimes get a bad rap ("the lowest form of wit"), but I think they have always been an essential part of poetry, that magic of a word hinging and doing two things at once. Why not risk it? The pun connected the machine door directly to Pandora and her jar. But the title also suddenly wrenched the machine of the poem open, and I realized I could just divide the lines up, a visual and metrical trick I had first encountered in certain poems by Cavafy. Why not? The pun and the visual spacing could I suppose be thought of as gimmicky, but they all came together (or pulled apart perhaps) at once, and seemed to be that crack that both let out the stewing evils and somehow kept hope inside. Strife, the Muse, seemed to approve. (From an article in the Poetry Society of America.)