Christmas Poems

Image by Willgard Krause from Pixabay

If you haven't completely overdosed on Chritsmas by now, here are some poems of the season and day from The Poetry Foundation.

They range from "Account of a Visit from St. Nicholas" by Henry Livingston

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house,

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;

to the anonymous "The Twelve Days of Christmas"

The first day of Christmas,

My true love sent to me

A partridge in a pear tree.

and into Yeats' "The Magi"

Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,

In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones

Appear and disappear in the blue depths of the sky

With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,

And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,

And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,

Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,

The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor.

and a whole group of contemporary takes on the season, such as Mary Jo Salter's "Advent."

...on her Advent calendar.   

She takes it from the mantel   

and coaxes one fingertip

under the perforation,   

as if her future hinges

on not tearing off the flap...

And when the day and season is over, we have "December 26" by Kenn Nesbitt who provides his "list / of everything / that Santa Claus / forgot to bring." 

And Jane Kenyon's "Taking Down the Tree" reminds me of my own family's tradition of doing that on Twelfth Night.

By suppertime all that remains is the scent

of balsam fir. If it's darkness

we're having, let it be extravagant.

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This is how it has been, and this is how it is

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

Mary Oliver had a daily writing ritual of carrying a notebook with her as she walked through the forest. She wrote along the way. I think she needed nature and movement to find the words.

In an interview, she said "I don’t like buildings. The only record I broke in school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot with books. Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as they came to me and then worked them into poems later.”

I imagine that one of those poems is "The Pond." I particularly like the conclusion:

This is how it has been, and this is how it is:
All my life I have been able to feel happiness,
except whatever was not happiness,
which I also remember.
Each of us wears a shadow.
But just now it is summer again
and I am watching the lilies bow to each other,
then slide on the wind and the tug of desire,
close, close to one another,
Soon now, I’ll turn and start for home.
And who knows, maybe I’ll be singing.

 

In the title of her collection, Why I Wake Early, you learn of another of her daily habits. Those early morning walks and encounters with poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, and deer inspired poems and in greeting the morning, she found happiness. 

Her first collection, No Voyage and Other Poems, was published in 1963, and she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for the collection American Primitive. 

What connects all the poems is nature: hummingbirds, waterfalls, owls, trees, the ocean, snakes, wild geese, storms, sand crabs and changing seasons. Of course, from those specifics, the poems expand to larger themes like love, loss, joy, wonder, and gratitude.

    

A good starting place to read Mary Oliver is Devotions, the book in which she collected the poems she felt gave the best overview of her writing.

 

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The Snow That Never Drifts

The winter solstice is near but cold weather and snow have already fallen in many places, including on the holly outside my window.

This a poem that seems to be about snow by Emily Dickinson.

The Snow that never drifts —

The transient, fragrant snow

That comes a single time a Year

Is softly driving now —

So thorough in the Tree

At night beneath the star

That it was February’s Foot

Experience would swear —

Like Winter as a Face

We stern and former knew

Repaired of all but Loneliness

By Nature’s Alibi —

Were every storm so spice

The Value could not be —

We buy with contrast — Pang is good

As near as memory —

When I was presented with this poem in a college class, it was given as an example of the puzzling nature of many of Emily's poems. The professor asked us: What kind of snow never drifts? Is snow ever fragrant? Is this poem really about snow?

My first answer would be that she was thinking of a "snowfall" of white petals from a tree in spring. It's a common image in haiku.

But what about her reference to February and winter? (And "February's Foot," I thought - what's that all about?) Does she really mean this snow is only figurative?

Maybe a tree bloomed in February (In Amherst, Massachusetts? Hmmm...) but got hit with a winter blast and lost all its blossoms. If every storm was as "spice" (scented), "the Value could not be" - What could it not be?

"We buy with contrast — Pang is good / As near as memory —"  Do we 

Oh, Emily. If only we could chat over some cake and tea. We have so many questions.

What is your interpretation of this poem?
Post a comment answer below.

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Thanking Margaret Maher on Emily Dickinson's Birthday

I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Are you – Nobody – too?

Then there’s a pair of us!

Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!

How public – like a Frog –  

To tell one’s name – the livelong June –  

To an admiring Bog!

Taking a few minutes to remember Emily Dickinson, born on this day in 1830 and Margaret Maher.

Emily wrote nearly 2,000 poems, but she only published about 10 of these in her lifetime.

The family's maid, Margaret Maher, was the only person who knew about the full output of her writing. While Emily was in the kitchen with Margaret, baking loaves of bread and cakes, she sometimes scribbled poems on wrappers and the backs of shopping lists. Maher was literate and she even dabbled in poetry herself now and then and the wrote some poems back and forth to each other. Some scholars believe that Maher’s Irish syntax made it into some of Dickinson’s work. 

Dickinson trusted Maher with her poems and stored them in the trunk that Maher had brought over from Ireland. Dickinson left strict instructions for Maher to burn her poems after she died, but when the time came, Margaret, thankfully, couldn’t bring herself to do it.

She brought the poems to Lavinia, Emily’s sister and though Lavinia had already burned most of her sister’s letters, she agreed with Maher that the poems should be published.

Maher also supplied the only daguerreotype that we have of Emily Dickinson. The family didn’t like the picture, but Maher kept it and gave it to the publisher to include with the first edition of Dickinson’s poems.

Thanks to Margaret for allowing the world to share those poems.


To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

You can read some of those poems at https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poems/45673

Source: http://writersalmanac.org/episodes/20161210/

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Prompt: Thanks

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It's the end of a terrible year. In America, we celebrated Thanksgiving last month, though celebrating was very different than in past years. Many families could not get together due to pandemic restrictions and fear of hurting those they love. Still, I felt like people were still looking for things to give thanks for despite all the bad news in 2020.

Our model poem this month is "Thanks" by W.S. Merwin from his collection Migration: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2005).

 

A reading of Merwin's poem. Part of a longer series of readings.

I can identify with many things in the poem in the context of 2020 though it was written years ago. Of course, that is what is true about all great literature - that it continues to be relevant long after it is written.

with the night falling we are saying thank you

we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings

we are running out of the glass rooms

with our mouths full of food to look at the sky

and say thank you

That makes me think not only of Thanksgiving dinner but of the several meteor showers that appear in the final months of the year.

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging

after funerals we are saying thank you

after the news of the dead

whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

Hospitals and funerals (though very different when they do occur)  and the news is full every night about the number of cases of COVID19 and the number of deaths globally.

over telephones we are saying thank you

Over phones is very likely how you have stayed in touch and talked with friends and loved ones.

And we may be frustrated with
the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change" 

but 

we go on saying thank you thank you

There is a kind of optimism in the idea that

we are saying thank you faster and faster

with nobody listening we are saying thank you

we are saying thank you and waving

dark though it is

William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City on September 30, 1927. Over the course of his long career, Merwin published over twenty books of poetry and almost as many books of translation. Merwin served as Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress and as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2010 to 2011. He died on March 15, 2019.

Some might call this a praise poem which is one of tribute, of gratitude, of honoring something or someone. I think it is different than that, but you can read some praise poems online and decide for yourself.

It is interesting that in Merwin's list of things to be thankful for are probably some things for which you would not be thankful. Perhaps, his final lines -  “we are saying thank you and waving / dark though it is” explain their inclusion.

An additional poem to consider is one by Joy Harjo that was included on a list of "Thanksgiving poems for kids." I'm not sure how old a "kid" would need to be to understand that poem, but I like the image of the kitchen table which is both a real kitchen table and the table of the world. 

I also like how the rather pessimistic title - "Perhaps the World Ends Here" - leads rights into its opposite - "The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live" so that when we arrive again at that title line it continues with "while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite." 

For this year-ending prompt that concludes a very difficult 2020, we ask you to consider thanks in all forms. From a list of many things to be thankful for, to a dismissive, sarcastic thanks, there are many things on that table of thanks - some we love, some we cannot love.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: December 31, 2020      We wish you a healthy new year!

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Mini-Prompt: What If

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I saw a video interview with Ray Bradbury a long time ago in which he said almost everything he has written has been inspired by asking "what if."  Bradbury wrote novels and stories but a lot of his writing advice applies to poetry too.

The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone. (from a 2010 interview with Sam Weller, published in The Paris Review)

Bradbury told about an encounter he had as a boy in 1932 with a carnival magician, Mr. Electrico. Wreathed in static electricity, Mr. Electrico touched the young Bradbury on the nose and said, “Live forever!” Ray returned to the carnival the next day for advice about magic. Mr. Electrico introduced him to the other performers in the carnival and told Bradbury that he was a reincarnation of his best friend who died in World War I. 

What if he could live forever or he was reincarnated or if there could be a truly magical carnival? Bradbury later wrote, “a few days later I began to write, full-time. I have written every single day of my life since that day.” That carnival came back to him along with all the "what ifs" of his boyhood and became his novel Something Wicked This Way Comes. What if a magician at a carnival could grant your greatest wish? "By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes," says one of the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth.

I used to ask my teenaged students to write a what-if poem after we had read a few Bradbury stories. One of the model poems I use that they always seemed to like was an old one - "What if you slept" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. I never told them before the poem or the writing how old Coleridge or the poem was because not only is that irrelevant to the lesson but because the poem doesn't seem old at all - especially coming from the opium addict that wrote "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

What if you slept

And what if

In your sleep

You dreamed

And what if

In your dream

You went to heaven

And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower

And what if

When you awoke

You had that flower in your hand

Ah, what then?

Coleridge by John Chubb - from the collection of the Blake Museum

Coleridge's life is interesting - and sad. Born in Ottery St. Mary in Devonshire, England in 1772, he wrote that he was falling into a deep depression when he was introduced to the poet William Wordsworth in 1795. That first year of their friendship was the most productive period of Coleridge’s life. 

They both liked to compose their poetry while walking, so they took long walks together throughout that summer, though Wordsworth preferred to stay on the path while Coleridge liked rough terrain. 

That winter, they spent several days hiking along the coast, and to pass the time they made up a gothic ballad about a tragic sea voyage. Coleridge became obsessed with the poem when he got home, filling it with images from nightmares he’d had since he was a kid, and it became “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798).

It's a difficult poem to read today though the story of a sailor who brings a curse on his ship when he kills an albatross is full of sea monsters and the ghosts of his dead shipmates.

The poem brought him some fame and money but within a few years of writing it he became addicted to opium, which killed his creativity and ruined his friendship with Wordsworth. He failed to complete most of his ambitious projects, including a 1,400-page work of geography, a two-volume history of English prose, a translation of Faust, a musical about Adam and Eve, a history of logic, a history of German metaphysics, a study of witchcraft, and an encyclopedia.

His friend Charles Lamb wrote of Coleridge, “His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.” What if he had not become addicted to opium?

If you try writing a what-if poem and would like to share it, post it as a comment to this post. (All comments must be approved before they appear.)

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Prompt: The Future

Future Time by Pete Linforth

I read Mary Jo Bang's poem "How it will feel months from now" when it was part of the Shelter in Poems series on poets.org. With that title/first line that feels so appropriate in this pandemic year, I paused and thought to myself, "How will it feel months from now?"

Mary Jo has said of this poem, “The sameness of quarantine can feel at times like a state of suspended animation, a perpetual NOW. With so little by which to measure time, I found myself noticing those things that did change, like the sky in the window at the end of a day. Seeing the color shift reminded me of other changes—some that had just happened (a siren had sliced through the silence), and some that had happened before now (a different silence, a different siren)—and that made me wonder what this NOW would feel like in the future.”

People have been calling every day "Blursday" as they seem to blend one into another. I saw someone post in October that the date was March 225th, as if once they started to "shelter at home" in March the month just never ended.

The poem says as much -

The walls of time dissolve whenever
the lights are turned off. The lights
that made the day so easy to be with.
I fold myself away. 

Looking up the poet's bio, I found another poem of hers that seems to have a connection. It's another 2020 title-is-first-line poem about thinking of the future. The poem is "Speaking of the future, Hamlet":

is saying, someday this day will be over.
A moon will presumably still be above:
a bone quiet, an inflatable in the scene

—the cool blue swimming pool
it finds itself in. And I will want to be.
My mother, the Queen, will want only

my father, the King. All will be want
and get. And I will be me. And O, O,
Ophelia—will be the essence of love...

This month we are going to ask you to write a poem about how it will feel in a few months (or years). We want you to explicitly think and write about the future. This does not have to be a pandemic poem, but it might be one. We also want you to follow Mary Jo's example and make your title your first line, or at least have the title continue directly into the main poem. (This is something that usually happens in an "untitled" poem but your first line should also serve as a proper title.)

Submission Deadline: November 30, 2020

  

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