National Poetry Month freaks me out. I am just sitting here, quietly drinking my coffee, when Lynn Neary comes on the radio to rhymingly inform listeners about “National Poem in Your Pocket Day.” Damage! Damage! (You should listen to her for full effect.)
I am trying to think of what it is like. It is like watching a child try to show you a cat he loves. A beautiful cat! And the child just happens to hold the cat by his tail. An unhappy cat! Woe!
But I do love pockets. And cats. And poems. And woe. THEREFORE, I am licking my wounds and recommending the following pocketable word-things:
1. One or several of Aram Saroyan’s Minimal Poems. Ugly Duckling Presse sent out word yesterday that Saroyan’s book just won the PSA’s William Carlos Williams Award. (Hooray! No woe at all.) The poems are so small you could fit twenty in your pocket at a time, like confetti. Try this:
an oyster
can’t
read this
or this:
eyeye
or this:
morni,ng
Or, if you want to get very visual, try “Boxing Match,” which I’m not sure how perfectly I can reproduce:
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2. Just as visually pleasing are Giuseppe Steiner’s Drawn States of Mind. The logical consequence of the Futurist’s “words-in-freedom,” Steiner’s poems use language only in their titles, while the images themselves tend toward quickly apprehensible, funny, touching and exciting visual metaphors. (I am using “metaphor” in the most open sense. Think “doorway into new understandings.”) I scoured the internet for a few examples with no luck. Woe! But also hooray, because maybe now you would like to go buy the book?
3. Perhaps you would like to be topical, in which case, I recommend James Tate’s “How the Pope Is Chosen.” (“After a poodle dies / all the cardinals flock to the nearest 7-Eleven. / They drink Slurpies until one of them throws up / and then he’s the new Pope.”)
4. It strikes me that Andy Grace’s Fecund Minimum poems are pocketable. I do not strike back.
5. I am not going to talk about Christopher Smart.
6. The lovely thing about poems is that they are so useful. Keeping one in your pocket just makes sense. For example–you are walking down the street. You see a friend. She hands you a skull ring. You have no idea how to express your gratitude, until you remember you are carrying Chelsea Minnis‘s “Skull Ring” in your pocket:
I am very excited about the skull ring. I didn’t know anyone would think I wanted a silver skull ring. Now, when I am rude to those who oppose me, I can just look down at the skull ring. It has ruby chips in the eyes! Ruby chips like the nasty flame in my own eyes when I am insulted or reviled. No one will dare oppose me now in my hometown…
You are immensely relieved.
7. When you are choosing your poem, you might want to think about the future, as in which poem would work well for “National Poem in Your Washing Machine Day” (April 24th). In this case, Emily Dickinson seems appropriate:
I felt a Cleaving in my Mind –
As if my Brain had split –
I tried to match it – Seam by Seam –
But could not make them fit –The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before –
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound –
Like Balls – opon a Floor –