Tribrach: for those who love (or would like to love) poetry
“Because in times like these/ to have you listen at all, it's necessary/ to talk about trees." -Adrienne Rich, "What Kind of Times Are These"
THE ELEGY OF THE KREMLIN BELLS
Marya Zaturensky
Peace to the quiet dead
And the unquiet soul–
Great peace from feet to head
White floods of time shall roll!
–
“Among the choice bits turned to poems in the book [Make Poetry Great Again by Chris Felt] are words about his daughter that Trump said around 10 years ago.
‘I have said
if Ivanka
were not my daughter,
perhaps
I would be dating her’
“Felt said the words may be ‘terribly macho, pitiful and confusing but when the quotations have space around them I see other facets of him'”.
Khadijah Queen – I never met Donald Trump but I sure have been grabbed by the you-know-what
I NEVER MET DONALD TRUMP BUT I SURE HAVE BEEN GRABBED BY THE YOU-KNOW-WHAT & I really don’t even want his name in my book & I almost didn’t tell this story but sometimes it’s important to name names & the luxury of fame is that it doesn’t matter what a nobody says if you have
–
My father doesn’t say ghost, though I know
he’s haunted. Instead he says, When they let
Uncle Marion out of that hospital, he didn’t
even move the same. He said they tried to take
his stories. He loves his fifteen uncles fiercely.
Nearly all of them drank, did time in prison
or mental hospitals, died before forty.
–
Nothing between us and Brooklyn Bridge
seen from our windows—on the other side of Pearl,
Dover is Frankfort, along the Bridge towards
City Hall—Governors, Staten, Liberty islands,
–
Molly McCully Brown – Grand Mal Seizure
There’s however it is you call,
& there’s whatever it is
you’re calling to.
–
“Civic poetry is public poetry. It is political poetry. It is about the hard stuff of life: money, crime, gender, corporate excess, racial injustice. It gives expression not just to our rites but also to our problems and even our values; these poems are not about rustic vacations.
“Civic poetry is ascending. It has asserted itself in recent years in the form of poetry slams and, of course, political rap, but now it is rising again on the page….”
We were cold. All day we were cold.
We thought of bitter gods (hard not to think of gods
so close to the heavens) and were frightened.
The mountain is divided. On one side the sun spilled its brilliance.
–
Today, omg, I’m just so spaced out and splendid
———-as I walk this earth without death, without an apron,
without being a wife and so my queer heart transforms into the nostrils of a
—–winter
——workhorse whose exhalation breaks through the iced tulip sky.
–
A giant step up into the dip—
the unavoidable tremble of cocktail tumblers
against bottles of bourbon and bitters
droning the spitoon.
1.
When we had done our business with the lobster-man
choosing our dinner from dozens of creatures packed
in a fiberglass tank in his garage, their pincers pinched
in plastic bands but all visibly sensible and frustrated,
–
We’re not from here. We don’t aria, we warble.
We wore suits to get here, rumpled by the hot car ride.
Pumped our own gas. In Heaven two days,
still the custom shirtlessness offends. Like it’s the g-d
French Rivera. (You say it yours. We’ll say it the right way.)
Nor do we au revoir. We eat without speaking, hunched over
–
Something went crabwise
across the snow this morning.
Something went hard and slow
over our hayfield.
–
Dean Rader – America, I do not call your name without hope
America, I do not call your name without hope
not even when you lay your knife
against my throat or lace my hands
behind my back, the cuffs connecting
–
Mary Schmich, a columnist from the Chicago Tribune, took inspiration from Terrance Hayes’ new “Golden Shovel” poetry form & asked her Facebook followers to create poems using the words “Make America great again.” She admits that “None of these verses will wind up in an anthology of the world’s greatest poems, but they remind us that in politics and poetry, words are what you make of them.”
“Here’s how the form works: Pick a line from a poem. Then write your own poem, using one word of the borrowed line as the last word of each line of yours. Keep the words in order.
“It’s time we make
This place we call America
Not just great
But good again.
“See how it works? Read the last word of each line and you get ‘Make America great again.’
“Today, Bishop’s popularity is soaring while Lowell’s has waned. Seamus Heaney once attributed this to Lowell’s background and the “orchestral crash” of his verse: “Lowell was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, a Eurocentric, egotistical sublime, writing as if he intended to be heard in a high wind.” It’s not always easy to feel sympathy for an artist with a trust fund and whose family have their own graveyard. But Lowell knew he was privileged, and the beauty and specificity with which he describes his world creates space for the reader to reflect on their own experience. His writing may even have subtle political messages for our times; the poet Claudia Rankine, who cites Life Studies as an influence on her groundbreaking 2015 work Citizen: An American Lyric, sees in Lowell’s book “a struggle with … the construction of whiteness”.
“…Lowell was consistently at odds with the US government, serving jail time as a conscientious objector during the second world war, rejecting an invitation to the White House in 1965 to protest Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policy, speaking at the March on the Pentagon in 1967.”
