Poetry doesn’t vote.  It can’t rule.  It sits on no juries.  It signs nothing into law.  It neither runs companies or organizes houses of worship.  And, it never ever wins an Academy award or Olympic Gold Medal.  Or, war.  On all of these fronts that matter, poetry is powerless.  And for that very reason, of course, it is incredibly powerful.

Poetry is our grins, our anger, your life, my death.  It’s the birds that stitch air.  It’s the soul of night, the feast of day, and that ever present caution that’s careless.  Poetry doesn’t decide.  It doesn’t provide.  If it answers at all, it does so with questions.  And, to be honest, poetry doesn’t care; it cares as deeply as wells do, yes, but it never brings you water.  It wants nothing from you except wanting – this is probably its most gifting power.

And it soars, when allowed to, over just about anything else we can imagine.  It’s not the clouds above so much, but our need for them.   Said all at once, poetry is powerful for what it cannot be, and for the dreams it wants.

If you should ever encounter a poem that makes you jump, ask yourself why.  Most likely, the answer – if there is one – will be from so far-fully inside you that ancestors will wink.

Finally, poetry is really nowhere and so it’s just about everywhere around us.  It lives in the corner of your eye.  It watches everything from the side.  Poetry is the best glancer of all.   It also aches with whatever is gone.  And, it cheers – even raves – for what may never be.  All to say, thank goodness – and badness – for poetry, and for our never being completely sure how powerfully potent it really is.

image used with permission by Hiram Larew

Hiram Larew’s work has appeared most recently in Little Patuxent Review, FORTH, vox poetica, Poetry Super Highway, Poets & Artists, Every Day Poems, Lunaris Review (Nigeria), Amsterdam Quarterly, and The Wild Word.  Author of three collections, he’s been nominated for four national Pushcart prizes, is a member of the Shakespeare Folger Library’s poetry board, and organizes several events in Prince George’s County, Maryland and beyond including Poetry X Hunger and The Poetry Poster Project. He is a global hunger specialist, and lives in Upper Marlboro, Maryland.

This piece first appeared in Echo World, and subsequently in Poets & Artists, Tales from the Forest, Miriam’s Well (blog) and Huffington Post’s Thrive Global.

a blog post by Anne Reis, HoCoPoLitSo Board Member

Poetry is alive and well at the Homewood Center, Howard County’s alternative school. I know this to be true because I am Homewood’s Media Specialist and for the past 10 years, with the support of HoCoPoLitSo, I have been able to host poetry workshops in my library.

Students who attend Homewood have not succeeded in the comprehensive school environment. Poetry gives these students a safe and therapeutic way to express themselves and exposes them to the power of the written word.  The transformative power of poetry was never more apparent than earlier this year when HoCoPoLitSo’s Writer-In-Residence, Joelle Biele came to our library for a visit.

From the moment that she greeted the students with her calm spirit and razor sharp intellect, she engaged them in a different way of thinking.  With so much emphasis in school curriculum on STEM related subjects, students are rarely given the space or the time to think creatively.

Ms. Biele began her presentation by literally opening the space in the room with a Youtube video of Sandhill cranes migrating.  The peaceful images of cranes in flight gave our students a moment of Zen and the background knowledge that they needed to understand her poem, Autumn.  Ms. Biele challenged our students to think about what it means to write and the types of writing that they do in their daily lives.  Is a text writing? Can a Facebook post be poetry? And from where does a writer find his or her voice?

Students were also asked to respond to the prompt called “I am.”  Such an important question for every young person, and perhaps even more important for the struggling learners at Homewood: Who Am I?  Who asks students such questions and who cares about their answers?  The answer is loud and clear: poets!

For many of the students at Homewood the time spent with Ms. Biele was their first encounter with a poet, but hopefully it won’t be the last.

There are so many books to read in this world and life is so short that I almost never reread a book.  This week, though, I had to reread Julian Barnes’ novel, The Sense of an Ending. I had read it a couple of years ago, then I reread it to get ready for my book club discussion this week.

The thing is, though, I have this super power. Or a super weakness. It depends on how you see it, I suppose.

I have this ability to forget – almost completely – the plot of the book I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen.  Sometimes, I watch a movie and half way into it – a whole hour later – I realize that maybe I’ve seen it? (Yes, with a question mark.)  Sometimes I just keep watching… because I don’t remember what happens.

Although I might forget the plot – the who and the what – I often recall the feeling I had or the impression I got while reading a good book like The Sense of an Ending.  And I remember loving Barnes’ effortlessly poetic (and smart) lines and being impressed with the compactness of a novel that delves pretty deeply into big questions about memory, history, regret, and “Eros and Thanatos.”

When I opened my copy of the novel this week, I was struck by how clean the pages were – no marks, no underlines, no comments.  This is not usually how I read. I felt like this was a gift from my past self to this future self to come meet the novel for the first time again.  This time, much was questioned (with question marks in the margins), noted (with underlines and asterisks), and commented on (with words like “how?” or “selfish”).

That old lesson I learned – the first lesson I learned as someone interested in studying literature – came back to me: look for patterns. Mr. Berkowitz at Wilde Lake High School taught us that one – look for recurring themes and patterns in imagery. Reading Macbeth, we had to write down in our “symbolism journal” every instance of different types of symbols or imagery. It was painstaking. It was beautiful.

In The Sense of an Ending, the theme of faulty memory is very clearly – almost obviously – woven into every aspect of the narrator’s telling of his story. Every few pages, he’d remind us that his telling “consists of impressions and half memories.” Recalling the letter from his friend, he says, “to be true to my own memory, as far as that’s ever possible […].”  He talks about his life in terms of “the version I tell myself.”

So while reading this second time around, I complained out loud (to myself – because apparently I had forgotten), “How am I supposed to trust this guy?” And yet, I kept reading, to see what this man has to say and to find out what happened (as he’s trying to figure out what happened) and what happens.  It’s like a self-punishing feat, isn’t it?  Knowing that the narrator can’t be trusted, you just keep going along because he’s all you got.

And that is the beauty of this novel, of course.

For me, not remembering the plot, and only remembering the impression that it was mysterious and that it was poetic meant that I was in for a treat with The Sense of an Ending for the second time.

This is a novel I’d recommend to friends.  It’s smart. It’s full of lines you’ll want to underline. Most importantly, it challenges us to question what we think we remember not only about own own lives (the plot) but also how we remember (or imagine) the ways we impacted the lives of others. In the name of “self preservation” – which Barnes’ narrator claims to be quite good at – what or whom do we save or hurt?  When that “sense of an ending” approaches, what will we remember and how? And if we don’t have “corroborators” – something Barnes’ narrator is desperate to find – how will we know what we remember and don’t?

“Agains, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then.  Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.” – Julian Barnes

Ryna with her wife Stephanie at the Women’s March in Washington DC in 2017

A guest post by Ryna May, Professor of English at Howard Community College:

October is LGBTQ History Month.  When I think about LGBTQ history, I am of two minds and the poems included in the LGBTQ collection on Poets.org perfectly reflect that split.  Some of the poems are so absolutely ordinary in their subjects, like the poem, “our happiness” by Eileen Miles, and on one hand, I think, that’s progress: the lives of LGBTQ people are written and expressed in the same way as other lives.  That’s equality, right? Being a gay poet doesn’t mean that you have to write every poem about the experience of being gay.

But if we’re really talking about history, the conversation is incomplete unless we acknowledge that nothing is really the same.  Some might say, hey, you won the right to get married, so what are you complaining about?  That reminds me of the poem, “On Marriage” by Marilyn Hacker (1942) where the poet talks about the way in which LGBTQ people “must choose, and choose, and choose / momently, daily” to affirm their commitment to one another, “Call it anything we want” when society doesn’t quite know how to accept or handle this kind of “covenant.”

We talk a lot about “White Privilege” in cultural discourse, but we don’t talk a lot about “Mainstream Heterosexual Cisgender Privilege.”  It exists.  MHCP allows folks to do very ordinary things like hold hands in public without having to do a quick check of their surroundings.  Put it this way: there are times when showing affection to my wife in public – just a peck on the cheek – feels like a dangerous political act.

If we’re talking about history, we have to acknowledge that being an LGBTQ person is a unique and still unequal experience in this country.  There are subtle and unsubtle ways that society is set up to exclude and marginalize us.  And some of the poems I browsed on Poets.org do address that fact. I find myself drawn more powerfully to these poems because I do want to acknowledge the difference that exits.  A great example of this is “A Woman Is Talking to Death” by Judy Grahn.  The poem was written in 1940, and the lines that jump out to me are:

this woman is a lesbian, be careful.

 

When I was arrested and being thrown out

of the military, the order went out: don’t anybody

speak to this woman, and for those three

long months, almost nobody did: the dayroom, when

I entered it, fell silent til I had gone; they

were afraid, they knew the wind would blow

them over the rail, the cops would come,

the water would run into their lungs.

Everything I touched

was spoiled. They were my lovers, those

women, but nobody had taught us how to swim.

I drowned, I took 3 or 4 others down

when I signed the confession of what we

had done                together.

 

No one will ever speak to me again.

A friend of mine, Rob, hid the fact that he was gay the entire time he was in the Navy – it wasn’t just that he feared for his job, he also feared for his life, that other soldiers might threaten or harass him for being openly gay.  He hid it until he completed his tour of duty, and then he came out to all of his friends.  You might think that passing a law abolishing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” would end this discrimination, but you would be wrong.  This discrimination still exists in the military – though now the target has shifted from being gay or lesbian to being transgender.  Grahn’s poem was written in 1940; it is 77 years later, and we are not there yet. And because we live in the age of vindictive executive orders, we are too afraid that the next step in the movement will be a step backward.

If we’re talking about history, we have to acknowledge that we’re still in the middle of the story right now.   What started with Alan Turing, Barbara Gittings, Christine Jorgenson, Alan Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, the Stonewall riots, James Baldwin, and Harvey Milk has led us to the defeat of DOMA, Proposition 8, the victory of Edith Windsor, the success of Tammy Baldwin. But this complicated history also continues with events like the shooting in the Pulse nightclub and pronouncements that threaten the rights of transgender soldiers and that reinterpret Civil Rights laws to exclude protections for LGBTQ employees.  Current events are going to write these poems, and I want to read those poems too, not just the ones that try to normalize our experience.

One of the happiest days in my life was November 6^th, 2012.  That was the day that voters in my home state of Maryland affirmed the right of gay and lesbian couples to marry, and I knew that I would marry my wife.  Then, on June 26^th, 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that we should be seen as equal under the law.  In a stunning closing paragraph, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions.  They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law.  The Constitution grants them that right.” To read that, you’d think that we are living in a new era, but in reality, it isn’t quite true.

In “Love Song for Love Songs,” Rafael Campo writes that it is “A golden age of love songs and we still / can’t get it right.”  That’s what I think: If we’re going to talk about LGBTQ history and celebrate equality, we have to admit that, despite so much progress in the last few years, the last ten months have shown us that we still have so far to go. Sharpen your pencils – there is so much more to come.

Thursday, March 9, 2017 –
from 7-8:30 pm
Miller Branch of the Howard County Library
Let us know you are coming: register through the Howard County Library or call 410-313-1950.

Robert Bly: A Thousand Years of Joy – Official Trailer (2014) from Haydn Reiss on Vimeo.

Join the Howard County Library and HoCoPoLitSo for a special screening of the documentary filmA Thousand Years of Joy, which charts the path of revolutionary poet Robert Bly from Minnesota farmer’s son to radical anti-Vietnam War activist to wild man of the 1990’s men’s movement. Best known as the author of the bestseller Iron John, which launched a million men drumming in the woods, Bly has been both celebrated and vilified, but above all has persisted in championing the power and importance of poetry in today’s America.

Robert Bly was a guest of the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society in June of 1997. During his visit, co-sponsored by the Columbia Festival of the Arts, he led a workshop at Howard Community College, presented a reading in the Smith Theatre and taped an edition of The Writing Life with Cornelius Eady.

Eamon Grennan’s voice from the stage was low, intimate and slightly scratchy, as if he were whispering his poems into your ear. It was a lovely effect, one which the audience quickly took a shine to, but induced by Grennan’s terrible respiratory affliction.

Eamon Grennan at the book signing table. Photo by Lee Waxman.

Sick as a dog, Grennan traveled to Columbia anyway, and read at HoCoPoLitSo’s 38th Annual Irish Evening of Music and Poetry last Friday. He knew, as a small organization with little fat in our budget, that HoCoPoLitSo would be floored if he didn’t read. So he coughed backstage, and before and after taping his appearance on The Writing Life (HoCoPoLitSo’s literary talk show), popped cough drops, mopped his nose and soldiered on.

HoCoPoLitSo, and its audience Feb. 19, was grateful, for his reading, his gentle humor and his poems about his native country and ours, the one he adopted fifty years ago. He still migrates every year between Poughkeepsie, where he taught for forty years at Vassar, and the west of Ireland.

Her Excellency Anne Anderson, the Irish ambassador, introduced Grennan as “deeply rooted in Ireland, yet totally versed in the international tradition.” Grennan, she said from the stage, “finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, and sacredness in the small moment.”

Judges agree. Poet Robert Wrigley noted, on awarding Grennan the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, that “Grennan would have us know—no, would have us see, feel, hear, taste and smell—that the world, moment by ordinary or agonizing moment, lies chock-full with its own clarifications and rewards.”

Grennan has a special way with poems about the natural world; several in the audience commented afterwards how much they loved “Listen,” a ruminative poem about cow conversation. Friday night’s audience laughed and clapped for his preamble to his disquieting poem, “Rats,”: “I’m usually kind to animals,” he said, with a wry smile.

Eamon Grennan. Photo by Lee Waxman.

At the last heartfelt line, “Come back and wish on us,” from his poem “Ladybird and Mother,” the audience burst into spontaneous applause. His superstitious mother, he said fondly, always wished on the tiny red and yellow spotted beetles that the Irish call “ladybirds,” and we call “ladybugs.”

Many in the audience nodded sadly when hearing his elegy to the late, great Irish poet Seamus Heaney (Nobel winner and HoCoPoLitSo guest three times). The poem “Sudden Dark” describes how Seamus himself would have found the sharp shards of light in the dark of mourning.

“Pulling light out of dark,” Grennan explained, “poetry is about recognizing both sides constantly.”

Grennan even read from William Butler Yeats’ controversial and beautiful poem, “Easter, 1916,” about the Easter uprising 100 years ago this April, and called it “the most responsible political poem in English.”

And he stayed late, signing every last seeker’s book, especially his latest, There Now, and chatting with Irish, American and English alike in the lobby. Finally, about 10:15 p.m., he gave up the ghost, and asked for a ride to his hotel. Unflaggingly grateful and polite, he chatted in the car about the crowd, migrating back and forth to Dublin, and his daughter’s career as a visual artist before he and his cough disappeared into the lobby.

Susan Thornton Hobby

Recording secretary

Bonus: Below you can enjoy the episode of HoCoPoLitSo’s The Writing Life that Mr. Grennan recorded in 1995 when he last visited Howard County. In the video, he is in conversation with Terence Winch.

Susan Hobby is a member of the HoCoPoLitSo board. Look for her Lit Up column here on the HoCoPoLitSo blog.

A play about three generations of stress in one household sounds like a downer: a divorced workaholic mother; two sisters, one shy and slightly chubby, one an embittered vet who lost her left hand in Irag; plus a grandmother dying of cancer.

So what are Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell doing up on stage vamping while the ladies toss back wine coolers and wear neon wigs?

I’m eager to find out. Rep Stage is producing the world premiere of Technicolor Life, by Jami Brandli, that centers around this mainly female family. Maxine, a slightly awkward freshman in high school, just wants to help her sister, Billie, who returned from Iraq with no left hand, plus the psychic wounds that come from combat and military sexual assault.

Maxine’s mother is an overworked attorney who drinks a bit too much, whose husband left her for a younger woman a few years ago. And Franny, Maxine’s grandmother, shows up after being kicked out of the assisted living facility where she had been living. Turns out, she’s dying of cancer. But she’s also a live wire who insists the family do things together before she kicks off.

So they watch old movies — especially Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — and work makeover miracles. Billie’s not having it; she runs 10 miles a day and slurps from her “water” bottle of vodka to kill the pain. Maxine, with the help of her new imaginary Blonde friends, finds Billie a fellow vet to date, and finds her voice. Meanwhile, Franny is arranging her euthanasia with Canadian drugs and her going-away party. Throughout, high school student Maxine practices her vocabulary words (serendipity, debonair, unique) and does reports for school on amputation, assisted suicide and turret gunners. Doesn’t sound like a barrel of laughs, but the play reads tragic comedy. Things do get better.

The play captures the awkward efforts of Maxine, the rage of post-traumatic stress syndrome, the yearning for connection between family members.

An ingenious part of the text — since I haven’t seen Technicolor Life staged, I have to imagine it — is the “playing field,” a real space onstage that illustrates the imagination. The playing field becomes a dance floor, a makeover space, Iraqi combat reenactments and even Internet dating site brought to life.
Part of the Horowitz Center’s “Year of the Woman,” Technicolor Life runs Oct. 21 to Nov. 8 in Rep Stage. For tickets visit www.repstage.org.