Bain Books Daily Poem

Word

Terry Bain — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:36:00 +0000

Try a word
To make a word
That is just what it is
Not divisive
Not so full of juice
As the word juice
Example: mother.
You try to use that word
And have it mean just that.
Mother. Mom. Mum and life.
You need a great swoon
Of letters just to describe
Precicely what or how
Not to mention when
This mother of yours
Means.
So to hell with her.
To hell with you.
I’ll be back tomorrow.

John

Terry Bain — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:39:54 +0000

New words may begin here as you might expect
Smelling foul
Misspelled or autocorrected incorrectly
This technology insists that I enable my inconsistencies
Everywhere

For Whom I Keep Silent

Terry Bain — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:43:14 +0000

You are nobody. Or you are a friend. I shall – no, I will – also shout, because I love
you, because pain in the point of your chest where good meets evil discovers that the two
are not so distant from one another.

That, hell, I don’t even know what I’m saying here. For you. That I was not supposed to say.
That, hell, it is hell. That this hell includes me.
That don’t ever assume that I don’t give a damn – it is exactly a damn that I do give.

Some days, some moments, some times that is all I give. And some days, some moments some times
that will have to be enough.

Jabberwocky

Terry Bain — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 18:05:22 +0000

by Lewis Carroll

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

“LeZoom and His Room” Link-a-Poem

Terry Bain — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 19:08:22 +0000

To a child’s poem, though the poem is not childish (and though childish would hardly be an insult… I believe I would rather be called childish than adultish):

LeZoom and His Room.

Keeping in Touch

Terry Bain — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 13:28:32 +0000

The Robert Graves poem
, I’ve just listened to
so tempted to touch find and touch
, to hold that string
, the blocks of slate
, the word “slate” seeming
to ring
, I think not only that “there is a man who knows
how to read a poem
aloud, how to pronounce the word
dappled
” , but also, what a wonderful poem
to know
that Robert Graves poem
a warning to children
, one perhaps never heard by children
, one perhaps never listened to
, once tempted, my breath
, I cannot breath.

Link One: Writer’s Almanac
Link Two: Robert Graves

Black Friday

Terry Bain — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 01:27:48 +0000

There is nothing black
about the day

about the early darkness
even night

late afternoon
night, after

our star burns
away every speck of light

our dark is not
so black

should we call it black
claim its blackness

after all
night, tonight

shimmers
electric as day

can never utter
as pools of light

have never seen
and when the days are over

all we can be is
frigid,

as always, if you
remember,

your hands
have always been so.

Moxie and Dreams

Terry Bain — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 23:15:25 +0000

Two recent poetry collections—one playful, one pleasurably eerie—to get us through the 21st century.

by D. H. Tracy
Poetry Foundation Media Services

Feminine Gospels, by Carol Ann Duffy. Faber and Faber. $11.00.

I gather Carol Ann Duffy is the most popular poet in the UK, and the American publication of her seventh (adult) collection may be an opportunity to extend her empire. It could happen: Duffy’s work is so rich that it can’t help but be thoroughly of the place it was written in, but her consistent moxie, her affable rambunctiousness, may well hit some kind of public bull’s-eye here. And Duffy’s poems are getting better and better. In her first couple of books you get the feeling that a claustrophobic talent is squeezing itself into the tight spaces of girlhood and minor monologues, when what she really wants to do is let it rip. She is now doing that; the poems feel simultaneously more playful and more necessary.

Utterly uninterested in wisdom, rhetoric, or meditation, she imagines the poems with systematic vigor, as if they were bathyscaphes she were going to descend in and their soundness depended on the quality of her invention. A poem may start out being about dieting or shopping and, just when it seems about to run into a brick wall of predictability, Duffy skid-turns into a fantastical variation that may be allegorical but is principally just clever. The dieter in “The Diet” shrinks into a mote drifting on the breeze and, accidentally swallowed, finds herself—where else?—”inside the Fat Woman now, /trying to get out.” My favorite romp is “Sub,” in which Duffy beats McEnroe to win Wimbledon in five sets, sets a Formula One speed record, decks Mohammed Ali, rides the winner at Aintree, performs some sort of cricket feat I dimly comprehend (involving—tantalizingly—”googlies, bosies, chinamen, zooters”), walks on the moon, scores the winning goal in the World Cup, and is tapped to play the drums when Ringo has the flu:

           Minus a drummer, the gig was a bummer
      till I stepped in, digits ringed, sticked, skinned,
      in a Beatle skirt, mop-topped, fringed, to wink
      at Paul, quip with John, climb on the drums,
      clever fingered and thumbed, give it four to the bar,
      give it yeah yeah yeah. The screams were lava,
      hot as sea, and every seat in the house was wet.
            —From “Sub”

If her readings are half this good on her next book tour, I’m there.

Burnt Island, by D. Nurkse. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.00.

In J.M. Coetzee’s novel, Disgrace, the protagonist is a professor who has his students meditate on the distinction between, say, “burned” and “burnt” and “burnt up,” the difference being increasing degrees of grammatical perfection. Nurkse’s island is burnt, his past is burnt, for good, and the poet treasures any fragments he finds or retains: a pair of his late father’s shoes in the closet, a blood-fleck in the eye of a dead sparrow on the sidewalk, the name of an intersection where he witnessed a senseless beating. A heavy sense of the unrecoverable, along with short lines, figurative use of landscape, alternations of light and dark, noise and silence, give the book a pleasurably eerie sense of great intimacy and simultaneous impersonality.

The book is divided into three “suites,” which treat, respectively, New York and the events of 9/11, a troubled couple in a few places, including Burnt Island, and a number of curious facts about oceanography and marine biology. While the pervasive dreaminess is narcotic, it is not up to the task of getting around, under, through, or over the events of 9/11, which have an overwhelming prosaic quality in spite of themselves:

      A voice behind me shouted hurry
      and another screamed mercy.
      I braced my shoulders.
      All around me were voices
      pushing, pushing like men,
      and men crying like children,
      and a child calling help
      from behind a pebbled glass door.
            —From “The Evacuation Corridor”

When the related experience is fragmented and unable to account for itself, Nurkse’s style, already possessing these qualities, is not so much particularly apt as doubly confounded. In contrast, it works very well in the second suite, where the draining, incommensurable realities of couplehood lend themselves to floating:

      We made these bike tracks in the sand
      —don’t follow them—and this calcined match head
      is the last statue of our King.
            —From “Separation at Burnt Island”

Nurkse falters again somewhat in the third section, where he is writing out of (as he puts it) “an outsider’s fascination with biological language and the horizons it opens.” The poems here have a recherché quality that discombobulates his delicate, wide-eyed detachment. If you ever wanted to read a monologue by a sand lugworm or Ommastrephes pteropus, here’s your chance. These weaker poems aren’t deal-breakers, but leaving Burnt Island with good impressions requires making some allowance for the nature of Nurkse’s gift, which varies widely in effectiveness depending on its subject. Followed into the reaches of memory, disappointment, and loss, at least, that gift is considerable and entrancing.

D.H. Tracy’s poetry and criticism appear widely. He lives in Illinois.

© 2006 by D. H. Tracy. All rights reserved.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

Upon Hearing that I’d Missed Donald Hall’s Birthday

Terry Bain — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:59:14 +0000

I used to write him
his poems said something I wanted to say

or said something the way they should be said
or said “hello” in a way that sounded like

digging in the earth for earthworms
and finding flint, or candy corn,

or loved ones we don’t speak to anymore.
Do you know what? I love you.

Flinty and full of
skeletal magic.

I’d forgotten, somehow,
that he was the Laureate, that

somewhere there was a man
leading toward you the secrets

that have never been secrets
that you have known all along.

There’s a string around my finger.
But what does it mean?

American Life in Poetry: Column 120 by TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006

Terry Bain — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 19:22:46 +0000

The loss of youth and innocence is one of the great themes of literature. Here the California poet Kim Noriega looks deeply into a photograph from forty years ago.

Heaven, 1963

It’s my favorite photo –
captioned, “Daddy and His Sweetheart.”
It’s in black and white,
it’s before Pabst Blue Ribbon,
before his tongue became a knife
that made my mother bleed,
and before he blackened my eye
the time he thought I meant to end my life.

He’s standing in our yard on Porter Road
beneath the old chestnut tree.
He’s wearing sunglasses,
a light cotton shirt,
and a dreamy expression.

He’s twenty-seven.
I’m two.
My hair, still baby curls,
is being tossed by a gentle breeze.
I’m fast asleep in his arms.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. From “Blue Arc West: An Anthology of California Poets” (Huntington Beach, CA, Tebot Bach, 2006), 117. Copyright (c) 2006 by Kim Noriega. Reprinted with permission of the author and Tebot Bach. Introduction copyright (c) 2006 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.