I will be blogging once a month during June, July and August. I treasure the connections I’ve made in the blogosphere and will continue to read others’ work.
A small literary magazine published my poem about a Pride festival and parade in my town. I’m in a mostly rural area with three towns or cities, known as Tri-Cities, in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. It’s a conservative area, making this event more remarkable. However, a strong progressive presence is also in the area. Though I am not gay or transgender, I support people’s freedom to be who and what they are. In my poem I tried to convey the good feeling that emanated from the TriPride Festival.
TriPride Parade and Festival
(Kingsport and Johnson City, TN and Bristol TN/VA)
In the style of the Song of Amergin*
We came holding rainbow flags
We came with 22 floats
We came with 1000 marchers
We’re 10,000 strong and peaceful
We’re the flood of humanity
We’re mothers, sisters, brothers
We’re cousins, and friends
We know love can be lost
We know the rush to judgment
We know our song comes from the mountains
We sing and our music flows over town
We know our song is heard ’round the mountains
We’re the fire and flood of humanity
We see a few mutter and turn away
We know we belong
We’re here with rainbow-striped socks
We’re here to dispel hate and promote care
We’re here with love as our companion
We’re here
*“English poetic education should, really, begin not with Canterbury Tales, not with the Odyssey, not even with Genesis, but with the Song of Amergin.” – Robert Graves
Published in Waterways: Poetry in the Mainstream, Volume 43, No.11, May 2023
The 1970s. New ideas on how to live. Being young in the city, searching for identity and love and the most amazing life possible – that was the story of many back then. They were trailblazers. Martin is one of them.
Starting today, you can pre-order my new book, Passages, going live April 17. Passages is a young man’s coming-of-age story in “anything goes” 1970’s New York City.
Martin lives within his male and female identities to the extent he has two personas. He identifies as male, but he also understands the world as Maryanne. As he evolves into adult sexuality, he dreams, fantasizes, and explores real life relationships. Escaping a suburban nightmare, he moves to the city. He fantasizes about meeting Simone (who he also perceives as Ethan), an actress on Broadway and wills himself to act, causing a collision of needs and personalities. He descends into temporary insanity, contemplating violence. After Simone leaves for the coast, he meets Rafaela, a woman who works in a Times Square restaurant who tests him even more than Simone. Rafaela is a hard-working immigrant. Simone is on her way to a legendary career. Can Martin untangle his childhood experiences of abuse, his mental health issues, and his complex identity?
I hope readers will enjoy the characters, drawn from “real life,” including the driven Rafaela, irrepressible scholarly Frankie, gifted poet Sally, poetry series organizer Richard, and the ambitious Simone.
Romance, sexual awakening, gender fluidity, celebrity, friendship. Descriptions of books, theater, poetry, film, and music.
Content warning: domestic violence, gun violence, sexual assault, mental health. A few erotic passages.
Headlights’ warmth chases winter’s chill, erases shadows fleeting night blazes
The Bench Poems, by Mary Clark
Hello, fellow bloggers and readers. I’ve been busy on two books for a few months (or many). Some of you know, as you have read at least one of them. Thank you! Every writer needs readers that will tell them when they’re on track and when they’ve sped off into the wilderness.
The first project was a revisit to Community, a memoir released last year. The revised version will be available soon. In it I venture to “wax poetic” now and then just to brighten the tone of the story. I like sunsets, but the rosy dawn is also beautiful.
The second project is the book I was working on last year: Passages. It’s been through several reincarnations. Hopefully, it will be ready for prime time in the near future – though I harbor hope for a publisher, and so time will tell.
Reading has taken a lot of my time as well. Among the books I enjoyed and – or would recommend:
Horse, by Geraldine Brooks.
She shows the way thoroughbred racing is intertwined with American history, specifically, with racism. The use of black grooms and trainers, many enslaved, to care for these horses, and their depictions in paintings of the pre-Civil War era, is told so well I felt I knew the men and the artists. Our current history appears in a parallel story. She is deft at describing the changes in thought and language that accompany the honest examination of racism in the U.S. And when stereotypes can surprise us, whether white or black. The horses are characters with personalities, too. The central horse, Lexington, is gifted and used to enrich his owners, while also rising above them to become a legend.
Angel Landing, by Alice Hoffman.
When I was reading this, I asked myself, when is this? No one had cell phones. People were collecting change for the bus. It’s old times, but I realized, within my lifetime. I can remember (dimly) those days. The book was published in 1980. That doesn’t mean it’s not relevant. Because it is, very. The story takes place in a small village on Long Island, once a hopping seaside town and now forgotten as people moved to the trendier places. Another reason it’s not a big draw is the large nuclear power plant, Angel Landing, clearly visible on a point of land nearby. A young woman, Natalie, returns to her aunt Minnie’s (Minnie is a live wire) boarding house (now empty) in the town, with her activist upper-crust boyfriend bunking in an office where he can work on his anti-nuclear cause nonstop. As she sits in her aunt’s house she notices the sky turning color. Later, an explosion. There’s been an accident at the plant. I won’t say more, but this story is an oddly surreal, moody, wandering journey to self-realization. While it’s set in the “old times,” it’s modern in many ways. Now I find it lingers in my memory.
Our Missing Hearts, by Celeste Ng.
As we face potential conflict with China, this book takes on the issues of nationalism, fear-mongering, “patriot laws,” family separation, and the ease with which a democratic republic can become a dystopian society. A pandemic followed by economic hardship and riots is blamed on China, and all Chinese people in the U.S. are suspect. Books are banned, protests quashed, laws are passed limiting Chinese-American freedoms (education, employment, travel), and ultimately, the government reaches into family life, taking children from parents who might taint them with un-American ideas. A mixed couple find themselves caught up in the hysteria. This book raises vital questions about the direction of our country, and any country that still calls itself a democarcy.
February means Valentine’s Day, the season of the heart, so I’ve collected some love poems for you. Of course, there are famous ones, such as Elizabeth Barret Browning’s “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count The Ways,” and W. H. Auden’s “The More Loving One.”
These poems are by contemporary poets as well as those who were writing long ago.
And poetry can come in other forms. In Australia, voters are preparing for a referendum on the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” giving a voice to the original inhabitants, the Aboriginal people.
History Is Calling, the Uluru Statement from the Heart, video
A medley of poems and songs begin with one of my favorites, “The Reclining Gardener,” by fellow poet and blogger, David Selzer.
Outside the sky is light with stars; There’s a hollow roaring from the sea. And, alas! for the little almond flowers, The wind is shaking the almond tree.
How little I thought, a year ago, In the horrible cottage upon the Lee That he and I should be sitting so And sipping a cup of camomile tea.
Light as feathers the witches fly, The horn of the moon is plain to see; By a firefly under a jonquil flower A goblin toasts a bumble-bee.
We might be fifty, we might be five, So snug, so compact, so wise are we! Under the kitchen-table leg My knee is pressing against his knee.
Our shutters are shut, the fire is low, The tap is dripping peacefully; The saucepan shadows on the wall Are black and round and plain to see.
The Look
Sara Teasdale
Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.
_____________
Serenade
Djuna Barnes
Three paces down the shore, low sounds the lute,
The better that my longing you may know;
I’m not asking you to come,
But—can’t you go?
Three words, “I love you,” and the whole is said—
The greatness of it throbs from sun to sun;
I’m not asking you to walk,
But—can’t you run?
Three paces in the moonlight’s glow I stand,
And here within the twilight beats my heart.
I’m not asking you to finish,
But—to start.
_____________
Wild Nights - Wild Nights!
Emily Dickinson
Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!
Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!
Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!
Going from the old year to the new, we pause for reflection and try to envision the future. The present moment fills us at the passing of the old, and we believe in that moment the future has endless opportunities and perspectives as it stretches out before us, beckoning. What is the truth of our position in time? Fleeting or part of an eternal process? Both, I suspect. Whatever you believe the poets have communicated the transitory moment, our death, our loved ones’ deaths, changes that upheave our lives. They have celebrated birth, new life, continuity, and the bonds of love that defy even death.
Which brings us to Shakespeare and one of the greatest poems about the waning of life and human resiliency.
Sonnet 73
That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire Consumed with that which it was nourish’d by. This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Recently, watching YouTube videos of poets reading their work, Garrison Keillor said W.S. Merwin said that poetry always begins and ends with listening. I wish I had learned that years ago! Here is Merwin reading, “Yesterday.”
W. S. Merwin reading his poem, “Yesterday,” on YouTube
Another way is talking to the reader (as if to yourself), which many current editors will tell you not to do (ignore them).
Lines For Winter by Mark Strand
Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.
Another version of listening and talking is what I will title, “Generous.”
Sabbaths, 1993, I by Wendell Berry
No, no, there is no going back. Less and less you are that possibility you were. More and more you have become those lives and deaths
that have belonged to you. You have become a sort of grave containing much that was and is no more in time, beloved then, now, and always. And so you have become a sort of tree standing over a grave. Now more than ever you can be generous toward each day that comes, young, to disappear forever, and yet remain unaging in the mind. Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away.
And the new season begins.
Wind Rising in the Alleys
by Lola Ridge
Wind, rising in the alleys,
My spirit lifts in you like a banner
streaming free of hot walls.
You are full of unshaped dreams. . . .
You are laden with beginnings. . . .
There is hope in you. . . not sweet. . .
acrid as blood in the mouth.
Come into my tossing dust
Scattering the peace of old deaths,
Wind rising out of the alleys,
Carrying stuff of flame.
Song at the Year’s Turning
by R. S. Thomas
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays.
The props crumble; the familiar ways
Are stale with tears trodden underfoot.
The heart’s flower withers at the root.
Bury it then, in history’s sterile dust.
The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.
Love deceived him; what is there to say
The mind brought you by a better way
To this despair? Lost in the world’s wood
You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood.
The earth sickens; under naked boughs
The frost comes to barb your broken vows.
Is there blessing? Light’s peculiar grace
In cold splendour robes this tortured place
For strange marriage. Voices in the wind
Weave a garland where a mortal sinned.
Winter rots you; who is there to blame?
The new grass shall purge you in its flame.
This time of year as fall turns to winter I have a feeling of contemplation and a sense of endings after a hectic year. The “Harvest poems” I found online reflected that feeling and sense. I’ve chosen one that is celebratory of harvest, and several that are reflective about the meaning of our endeavors. Each is filled with a deep appreciation of the force of life. Here are a few of them, along with Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon” and the Native Song, “Ly O Lay Ale Loya” (Circle Dance).
Oh, ’tis sweet, when fields are ringing With the merry cricket’s singing, Oft to mark with curious eye If the vine-tree’s time be nigh: Here is now the fruit whose birth Cost a throe to Mother Earth. Sweet it is, too, to be telling, How the luscious figs are swelling; Then to riot without measure In the rich, nectareous treasure, While our grateful voices chime,– Happy season! blessed time.
— Aristophanes
Under the Harvest Moon
Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.
Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.
— Carl Sandburg
The Way In
Sometimes the way to milk and honey is through the body.
Sometimes the way in is a song.
But there are three ways in the world: dangerous, wounding,
and beauty.
To enter stone, be water.
To rise through hard earth, be plant
desiring sunlight, believing in water.
To enter fire, be dry.
To enter life, be food.
— Linda Hogan
Source: Rounding the Human Corners (Coffee House Press, 2008)
Harvest
I walk among bands of wheat fields gold and red on a low road where clouds sweep overhead. I walk among mountains steep and high where golden rods of wheat strike the sky. I reach to catch the spear-stalks as they fly. As day yields to clouds gold and red, I grasp fleet arrows of wheat and watch each seed as it falls through my hand’s reaping beat.
I walk through streams of grass yellow and red where stone pillars mark the dead. I walk among hills azure and green by the sea where white birds sing, an echo coming back from eternity. I grasp the feathers and rise above the waves. As day turns to dreams, my spirit fishes for ways to be – bring the seeds, ride the waves, be the echo, this is the harvest of every day, of my heart, my soul, my body, my life.
It’s been a month since my last post. A new project and health problems kept me from working on the blog. I know my blog isn’t the usual kind of personal observations, original poems, photographs, or serial editions of novels. My blog does focus on poetry, excerpts from my writing, and book reviews. I thought, I’ve been doing this for a decade, it is time for a change. Recently, I looked into Kindle Vella. Unfortunately, much of what I read there is of low quality. The blogosphere contains much better work. I will give Kindle Vella a try, though, and publish some or all of the new work on this blog, beginning with serial posts of Passages, my latest work in progress. I’ll continue with the poetry theme as well.
Cover in progress
Passages is a story of finding one’s place in the world in terms of sexuality, work, and social action. It involves gender fluidity, childhood physical abuse, sexual awakening and love. The time is the “anything goes” 1970s. This may not be for every one of my readers, I understand that. The writing is not graphic, but some passages may be considered erotic and others may trigger traumatic memories.
I’ve split the story between two people, male and female. Martin and Maryanne are twenty-somethings who have basically the same story. They are evolving into adult sexuality as they dream, fantasize, and explore real life relationships. They become involved first with a rising film star (Simone/Ethan) and later with a hard-working immigrant (Rafaela/Rafael) in the bustle and hustle of Broadway and Times Square, New York. All the while they try to untangle their experiences of domestic violence and mental instability. As they work through these complex relationships, they pursue their dreams of being poets and useful, creative people.
Will Maryanne’s and Martin’s gender influence readers’ reactions to the same situations? Will the words and actions of the male characters be viewed differently than the females? Passages is an experiment. Some parts of the narrative are repeated word for word (which may try readers’ patience!) In these, however, often a few important sentences differ. Other passages appear in one narrative but not in the other (and these contain clues or additional information to illuminate the other narrative, a suggestion by a friend ). I hope my readers will enjoy the literature, art and music mentioned, discussed, and/or quoted by the characters. At the end of each chapter, I’ll post author notes.
I grew up in Florida and know the state has many layers. It’s a complex place with a long history, going back to ancient indigenous civilizations and early Spanish explorers in search of treasure and the Fountain of Youth.
Florida gets a bad rap in the media and recent events haven’t helped dispel the reputation of the state as a place where people do crazy things. When I was 12, I began to write about it. What evolved was a long poem, “The Sailor Circus,” named for the Sarasota high school afterschool circus program (which still exists). In my 20s, an agent encouraged me to write a novel based on the poem, but she later decided not to take it on. For many years both the poem and novel languished among my papers and computer files. A few years ago I used much of it in a novella, Covenant: Growing up in Florida’s Lost Paradise. These past few weeks I added in more of the original words, adapting them when needed to fit the narrative. And then, I took parts of it and made this poem. I’m offering it to give people a different perspective on the great state, the elusive and always transforming, place called Florida.
Florida
Visions of Atlantis.
The trading ships of the world come into harbor,
bringing their gift, their legacy.
Sailing, circling, orbiting, we ride the tides,
before we merge with the fold and mantle of sea and sky,
will we circle around to the other side,
will we come back alive?
The resort town lies weblike on Florida’s Gulf Coast,
banyan roots in backland glades,
points of anchorage, where gravity takes hold,
rolls the city up each night like a window-shade.
Each morning beneath a peg-leg, pirate's sun,
the land unfurls, surfaces beneath the surface of the sky.
Mirages and miracles: buildings, beaches, marinas,
alligator farms, the circus.
White pelicans mirror the clouds,
moonflowers glow, passion vine
and coral bells flourish, herons nest,
and a mockingbird sings of paradise.
Ghost towns in morning glory and dust,
carnivals and suburban malls in the marshes.
On the southern Gulf Coast, burial grounds
of forgotten civilizations.
Echoes of Atlantis.
Lost worlds, new worlds spiral, drop,
rise and soar in a divine glare.
Gulf Coast’s angels’ wings and rare Juno shells,
a sea of dreams, with all things sailing
we navigate by the sun and moon,
flowing into ports of call,
sailing with grief and ecstasy,
the circuitous circus.
The trading ships of the world come into harbor,
bringing their gift, their legacy—
the heavy vessels of the past empty their holds
and are refilled, flowing to the future with a purpose—
we carry precious cargo: hope, love.
Swinging across the globe, in tumult and calm,
we circle with the joy of fulfillment in time,
creating designs so potent
they shape eternity.
Copyright 1974-revised 2022 by Mary Clark
The song, “A Salty Piece of Land,” by Jimmy Buffet, who pioneered Caribbean Rock’n’Roll in Key West, Florida, communicates the allure of a place, the sense of freedom, on the boundless sea.
Mary Clark’s fiction and poetry, all set in Florida:
Wikimedia Commons: Red-figure vase (hydria, or kalpis) by the Group of Polygnotos, ca. 440–430 BC. Seated, Sappho is reading one of her poems to a group of three student-friends. National Archaeological Museum in Athens, 1260.
Sappho’s poetry exists only in fragments, except for one poem and about four others with missing pieces that are long enough to attempt reconstruction. Her work once filled at least four volumes and was disseminated around the ancient Mediterranean world. Homer, her predecessor, wrote epic poems of war in a poetic style (dactylic hexameter) that suited historical episodes, lists, and long speeches, while she wrote in her own style (Sapphic stanza) of the battles and triumphs of love.
Her poems were meant to be accompanied by a lyre, thus lyrical poetry, the words either spoken or sung. Each line contained syllables that were at different pitches. Today, modern stresses give each word a greater or lesser emphasis but do not indicate pitch.
Sappho wrote at a time when heroic poems were being replaced by more personal ones. She included direct conversations in her poems. At times, she turned Homeric phrases around: rosy-fingered dawn became rosy-fingered sunset, and “black earth” created by armies was juxtaposed with fields of flowers.
Some say a cavalry corps,
some infantry, some, again,
will maintain that the swift oars
of our fleet are the finest
sight on dark earth; but I say
that whatever one loves, is.
This translation is by Mary Bernard, who didn’t keep to the four lines and meter but often communicated the poetic intent (IMHO).
42.
I have not heard one word from her
Frankly, I wish I were dead.
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to
me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love.
Translation by William Harris, showing what is missing in the fragment:
I just really want to die. She, crying many tears, left me And said to me: "Oh, how terribly we have suffered, we two, Sappho, really I don't want to go away." And I said to her this: Go and be happy, remembering me, For you know how we cared for you. And if you don’t I want to remind you .............and the lovely things we felt with many wreathes of violets and ro(ses and cro)cuses and.............. and you sat next to me and threw around your delicate neck garlands fashioned of many woven flowers and with much...............costly myrrh ..............and you anointed yourself with royal..... and on soft couches.......(your) tender....... fulfilled your longing..........
Wouldn’t be great to have this poem in its entirety? It’s about someone who has to go away, and how terribly (amazingly, wonderfully, deeply) we have felt, but we won’t forget each other. Memories are what we have, and hope.
Harris shows her alliteration in this stanza. It’s a wonder of the internet that we can see the Greek.
kai gar ai pheugei, taxeos dioxei ai de dora me deket', alla dosei ai de me philei, tacheos philesei kouk etheloisa.
Translated:
And if she flees, soon will she follow, And if she does not take gifts, she will give, If she does not love, she will love Despite herself"
Harris says about this stanza:
… each line shows a remarkable balance of structure, with a compelling progression toward Unity. First “pheugei/flee” is balanced by “dioxei/follow” where the Greek words have nothing in common phonetically. The next line speaks of Getting as opposed to Giving (in Greek deket’ and dosei) with clear initial alliteration of “-d-” (In English -g- ). But the third line uses the same actual verb stem: (philei/philesei meaning “love/will love”, bringing together the words as symbol for the bringing together of the two lovers. Very subtle and most effective because it doesn’t show right away, a sly effect suiting Sappho as the arch “weaver of wiles.”
Harris – Here is another delicate fragment with a celestial figure set against a very human backdrop:
Evening-star, bringing all things that morning dawn scattered You bring back the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child to its mother.
The Greek words especially in the last line are compact, repeated rhyme, so precise, it’s sublime.
Wikimedia Commons: Sappho holding a barbitos, from a Six technique kalpis c.510 BC by the Sappho painter. The vase is the earliest surviving depiction of Sappho. Now in the collection of National Museum of Warsaw. Drawing from D.M. Robinson’s Sappho and Her Influence, 1924.
whiter than virgin snow in the sun
gentler than water stirring to the gentlest breeze
a voice that pleases as no lyre can
bearing grander than a proud mare’s
skin so fair no rose has petals more delicate
softer than the thickest fur
far more precious than the most precious metals
This loving has burst into my head
as mountain wind falls into the crowns of oaks.
Copyright 1981 by Ulf Goebel translated with Dimitrios Moschopoulos
I hope you’ve enjoyed this visit to the work of one of Western society’s oldest known poets.
Mary Clark, Writer 