List of Poets I Want to Read

William Blake
W.H. Auden
P. J. Kavanagh
Keats
Mary Beddinger
Karyna McGlynn

It worries me that I am compiling this list in preparation for a relapse, so I will have a direction, something to do will I sit unable to participate in life out there. This makes me realise that I want to try and change the way that I approach the possibility of a relapse. My current thinking is that I have to live my life as if none will occur, and then when they do just wait them out. Maybe I need to try and prepare myself for a relapse, so that I can continue to live as active a life as possible during a relapse. This is difficult for a variety of reasons. I never know what course a relapse will take. Right now my left leg is getting weaker. Previous relapses have caused me to lose feeling in both legs. So even preparing physically for a relapse is hard. But what the hell has this got to do with poetry? It was contemplating my illness that lead me to want to try and write poetry and that led me to want to read poetry. Part of that desire was the knowledge that I could no longer focus long enough to enjoy novels in the way I would like to. I put that together with the knowledge that there are some things I wanted to do in life that I now know I will no longer do. I then looked for things I haven't done that I still could do, but would take some work. I realised that is a vast world out there, not just a physical world, but a world of human culture and I have not sampled whole continents of it.

A Coin-Operated Button-Down Collar

Today's poem on Verse Daily by Mary Biddinger, took me back to the USA where I spent 13 years. I thought I didn't miss the USA, didn't miss Michigan, but I read this and then followed the links to some of her other poems and knew that I did, I do miss Michigan. I miss the life I had there, I resent the fact that no one in my family seems to acknowledge that I had an American life for 13 years. It is as if by moving back to the UK, my American life, my American self has been erased. I long for someone who knows, who understands, who connects with my inner American mom.

Something about these lines:

"....Your
mother held up the convenience store on my street.
She used you as the getaway driver. Nobody shoveled
that neighborhood out. Too bad you hadn’t been born.
Of course she really didn’t steal anything. There was
no section for sewing notions....."

takes me back to that time, reminds me my life then, when my children were young and I used phrases like "convenience store" and "sewing notions" and felt at home in a strange land.

Perhaps I will add Mary Beddinger to my list and W. H. Auden

Today on Verse Daily

A poem by Susan Elizabeth Howe called Three Horses, which I quite enjoyed. I wasn't going to write about it, but I followed the links on the page through to another of her poems, Your Luck is About to Change, and changed my mind. I read both poems aloud and found myself laughing by the end of the second poem. I find it hard to articulate what it is that I enjoy about the poems. I only really know that I am enjoying them when I hear the reaction in my own voice.

What I really wanted to write about is the huge gulf that separates me, the have-a-go-retiree from the established published poet. The poems I read seem to be about very little, well crafted observations about not very much at all. My attempts are weighty with content. I am driven to write poetry because I have so much I want to say and want to find a means to express it. The poems I read don't seem to be about very much, as if it is the act and manner of speaking that is important, rather than what is said. Perhaps I sould go and read about form versus content. I don't expect I will through.

Today on Verse Daily

Today on Verse Daily I read I tried to write the truth, but it made me miserable by Karyna McGlynn. This is the first poem on there that I could say I enjoyed. I am not sure I can say why I enjoyed it. I followed the links to her other poems on Verse Daily and enjoyed them in the same way, without really being clear why I found them enjoyable. It was the first time I heard a voice when I read the poem on Verse Daily. With previous poems I have read them out loud and felt like it was just a stream of words coming out of my mouth, not a voice saying something. With Karyna's poems it felt like it was a voice saying something, only I am not at all sure what.

I had decided to choose a poet and study them, a dead poet. I have settled on William Blake, because I like his art work. Writing like this I feel like a child. I feel I write like a child. I wonder if that is because this is all new to me and I know so little about it. I wonder if it is because I am suddenly self conscious about my use of language. I am thinking about adding a contemporary poet too. Perhaps I will try and read more Karyna McGlynn.

Starting to Read Poetry

I've been looking for good places to begin read poetry on the internet.

I found Verse Daily. It prints a new poem each day. I think that all the work is contemporary and that the poems are all published elsewhere. I have decided to read it each day. I have been doing so for a week and seem to be getting very little out of it. I have started reading the poems out loud, but that doesn't seem to help.

I have also visited The Poetry Archive. This is a substantial collection of recordings of poets reading there own poems. It provides a number of ways to explore the poems, including guided tours by well known people with an interest in poetry. Each guided tour consists of a list of about six poems with the tour guides thoughts on each. From each recording it is possible to navigate to information about the poet, and their other poems. So far the poem that I have enjoyed the most has been Perfection Isn't Like a Perfect Story by PJ Kavanagh. I liked the fact that it rhymed and that it was clearly about a specific experience.

An Illigetimate Grief

He left on a Friday, the eleventh day, the eleventh month.

Our armistice signed, our pact complete

the day he took his leave.

He took his college journals, the rainbow scarf, a shelf full of books,

his prep-school letter-sweater and left an

illegitimate grief.

It's a shameful thing to love a violent man, more shameful still

to grieve his going, take time to mourn an

unacknowledged loss.

He woke me in the night to shout at me for some imagined slight.

He kicked the dog down the basement steps,

left bruises on my arms.

I never read his college journals, seldom wore the rainbow scarf,

darned his letter-sweater, and denied the

constancy of my fear.

I tried to leave so many times, but decided instead to stay,

and calculate raw probabilities

of death and of dying.

It seems so foolish now, absurd, but the chance he'd kill my children,

if I left, was stacked against the odds that

I would die, should I stay.

I'm well rid, better off without, my father, brothers, friends, proclaim.

I agree, and I alone am burdened by this

illegitimate grief.

Author's Note: I wrote this after being asked to contemplate loss and bereavement as an exercise for a course that I am taking. I realised that few of my friends or family were comfortable with me grieving or even recognising this particular loss.

Mr Kurtzke's Scale

Zero: how does it feel to be a zero? You see I forgot.

I knew it once, but time marches on, and I do not.

One, two, three, four, five: I skipped them all

and landed hard on 5.5, not my first or only fall

Six, six was hard, unforgiving, the purchase of my cane

kept me upright, steady, and brought me a new and lasting pain

6.5 a slow slide from 6, hardly noticed until my shopping bag

included crutches and with each step my left foot began to drag

from 6.5 to 8.5 was but a weekend's work, numb from tits to toe

there's no fighting it, I cannot win my daily battle with this foe

that brought me 8 months of bed-rest, personal care and humiliation

time to contemplate ten, the end, our final destination

on this scale designed to measure the depth of our despair

of damage wrought, of functions lost and lost beyond repair.

But what of joy, determination, of a life well lived, in the face

of such overwhelming odds? On your scale they have no place.

Now by some neurological fluke I'm back at 6.5 again

and urged by fate I sit and contemplate the meaning of that ten

that last mark, that final place where all hearts beat no more,

I wonder when I come to ten, will I see a dim and distant shore?

I find I cannot focus, or keep my mind upon that final mark, that final

beat, it veers to seriphim, cherubim, archangels, gabriel, rapheal, micheal, uriel

I cannot imagine what it is not to be, to not see my grandson grow old,

to never know the days must-have gadget, for my story to be all told

we who are marked by death (8.5 on a scale from 1 to 10)

are encouraged to make our plans: living wills, nil by mouth, for when

we find ourselves sliding from 9 (helpless bed patient), down feeding tubes past

ventilators to that point of no return to which we all must come at last

but I do not, I refuse, decline, plan instead to wing it, take it day by day

live in the moment, two fingers up to death, not let it hold sway

until I'm done, not accept death as my orderly ordained carefully planned lot

to some it looks like dying, to me it's living since it's all I've got

It is death itself I fear, the blank, unutterable, grasping finality of death

Author Note: I wrote this poem in response to the Expanded Disability Status Scale (EDSS) devised by John F Kurtzke, to assess disability in MS.

Kurtzke JF (1983). "Rating neurologic impairment in multiple sclerosis: an expanded disability status scale (EDSS)". Neurology 33 (11): 1444–52.

The Question

Can I learn to write poetry? This blog is intended to chart my attempt to learn to write poetry. I intend to post poems I have written, reactions to poems that I have read and other poetry related thoughts and resources.

After that basic question comes a host of other questions. Why? Where to start? How will I know if I have suceeded?

Why? I have time and inclination. Time due to chronic illness. Inclanation due to a desire to find a form of expression that will be less affected than drawing and painting, by increasing difficulty using my hands.

Where to start? I have started in two ways. I have started reading poetry on a daily basis and I have started writing poetry on a daily basis.

How will I know if I have suceeded? That I do not know.