Incendiary Lit

A New Path Will Bring Rich Rewards

by Jynne Dilling Martin

Make no mistake about it, slime molds are
the most interesting organisms on Earth.

Chop one’s body into little orange pieces
and strew it throughout a labyrinth:

the chunks actually find one another, slither
back together, reclump and glop their way out!

Why not take a page from their book, folks?
Our homogeneity is becoming alarming:

a dutiful child with shined shoes arrives
every thirty minutes for a pianoforte lesson,

the awkward herd in the women’s room
take a simultaneous piss at intermission,

we all seem to sit on our asses, look up
at bright things exploding in the sky,

give no thought to sleeping upside-down,
to shooting ourselves in both shoulders,

or to living full-time under the sea! Christ
tried to set a creative example: he was like

hey, heres a bunch of crazy things to try,
you can even put nails through your hands

and end up totally cool in just three days.
But two millennia later, no one eventually

lives on the moon. He must be disappointed.
Without eyes, wheels, hammers, or phone lines

slime molds have transcended vastly more
challenging circumstances; if they had brainstorm

as well as a sense of humor we’d be the punchline
of every lame-ass slime mold joke. How many

humans does it take to figure out regeneration?
Dunno Bob, shall we sprout fingers and count?

—

This wonderful poem was in the TriQuarterly guest edited by David Kirby and Barbara Hamby and dubbed “Ultra-Talk”. Those familiar with people like Charles Harper Webb, Denise Duhamel, Dorianne Laux, Albert Goldbarth, Campbell McGrath et al. will definitely enjoy this issue of TriQuarterly.  Just a couple notes about this very entertaining poem which opened up the wonderful world of slime molds to me. The tone is very consistent and believable, glop (L6) is an amazing verb. The poem does bring up a good question– what next? For humans, how’re we evolving now? Not that I’m about to get into trying to answer that, it would really just devolve into a lame ass slime mold joke I’m sure.

For more poems by Jynne Dilling Martin check out this bit at Boston Review,  and these four at Perihelion. (Don’t miss “An Animal With Claws Should Use Them”.)Word.

The Apples of Recollection
by Morri Creech

Once, stumbling into the twilight kitchen, drowsy, leaning above
the ripe fruit on the countertop, hearing only a moth thump
against the fluorescent light and a slight breeze swell the curtains,
I had a vision. There was a long path to the apple trees
my grandfather grafted when he was young. They shed their leaves
in the cold light. I walked there and found my father, twenty-six,
bent on a ladder, hoisting a half-full bucket toward the boughs.
The sunlight fell in columns through the biggest branches.
I knew somehow that my mother had been gone five months,
and still he picked apples for the pies she would never make.
One fell groundward and rolled toward my feet. I was sure
that if I picked it up, if I lifted it to my mouth and took a bite,
I would remember nothing of what I saw. And for a time,
there was nothing else, just that moment, a father busy at work
among the trees, picking the swollen apples no one would eat,
and his child beneath him, holding the one piece of fruit
he was strictly forbidden, for memory’s sake, to taste. All of this,
I knew, might pass through the gates of ivory in an instant.
And then I woke. I stood there alone in the fluorescent light
of the present, in the kitchen, holding the unbitten apple in my palm.

—

Indiana Review rocks. They’re one of the few magazines that actively keep an eye on their subscription list, and updated my address! What a wonderful surprise to get the newest IR in my mailbox. I’d been wrapped up in the Ultra-Talk issue of TriQuarterly, so definitely a slight change of pace, and perhaps it has something to do with the juxtaposition of the two journals over the holiday break, or maybe because I have a soft spot in my heart for a poem of my own, about a vision of my father and a piece of fruit. So, universality or coincidence? The Indiana Review liked it enough to print it, I was drawn back to this poem a number of poems while flipping haphazardly through the journal, so, anyone? What do ya think? You can’t deny that “Twilight Kitchen” and “in the fluorescent light of the present” sound sweet. Yes, they produce saccharin synesthesia. Anyway, subscribe to the Indiana Review. This issue’s cover looks very nice too, and they don’t have it online yet, so tah-dah. Here we go.

Teacher’s Lament

by Alan Dugan

The sidewalk says,
in chalk, that he
loves her. What a joke.

So fall is here
again and school
forces the issue: to sow

at harvest. It sits
the sexes side by side
to learn the mysteries

as if they could. Then
they can drive out
on first cold Friday nights

to learn their first delights,
pay later, and dream love.

—

Yes. It’s fall again. And what says fall like fallible youths?

 A quote from David Mamet’s essay “Hearing the Notes That Aren’t Played” about a certain trend/type of writing.

 Yes, it is true that life would be better if we were all a little kinder, and it is true that paint splattered in the air will fall to the ground. Both are true,but who would have suspected that they were notable?

which reminds me of a little selection from “James Dickey’s Dream” by David Kirby:

…………………….that makes me think of the remark
Jane Smiley made about how much better it would be

if American literature had sprung from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
instead of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
and Roy Blount, Jr.’s reply that that’s like saying
it would be better for people to come from heaven
than from sex.

Why? The two quotes are related, but I flipped through House on Boulevard Street like a madman til I found the quote which is follow (and preceded) by the idea of mimicry and homage. Coincidence? Heck yeah. But probably influenced by little memory ticks from studying the (Kirby) poem.

And now for something completely different. (borderline nsfw, but in a good way)

The Smiles of the Bathers

The smiles of the bathers fade as they leave the water,
And the lover feels sadness fall as it ends, as he leaves his love.
The scholar, closing his book as the midnight clock strikes, is hollow
and old:
The pilot’s relief on landing is no release.
These perfect and private things, walling us in, have imperfect and
public endings–
Water and wind and flight, remembered words and the act of love
Are but interruptions. And the world, like a beast, impatient and
quick,
Waits only for those who are dead. No death for you. You are
involved.

by Weldon Kees

–

The consumption by a project is a feeling I am altogether too familiar with, as are many people. The energy and excitement of that to-the-instant occupation, whether its the currency of a breast stroke, or in the swimmer’s case a flutter kick, the loss of that occupation allows the mind to settle back into the inevitabilities of life which is why on my IRS form I just wrote: No taxes, writing!

The Sour Aftertaste of Dinner

by Richard Fein

The couple that was at the next table wore wedding rings, surely they were once in love.
But were they still soul mates or just two souls sitting side by side.
Menus covered their faces, avoiding the eye-to-eye.
The waiter took their orders and while they waited each kept behind a paperback novel.
From soup to salad to entree there was silence and neither shared from the other’s plate.
They both skipped desert so nothing sweet was on their table.
Only when their bill was being paid did their hands touch, accidently
They apologized, actually apologized to each other.
And as we watched, our own romance cooled to lukewarm.
But somewhere, sometime, on our way home,
we looked at each other and our eyes screamed not us, not us,
as we kissed deeply to wash away the sour aftertaste of dinner.
–

322 Review is the literary journal published by Rowan University’s MFA program. They publish 4 online issues, and 2 print issues (though the first print issue is the only one out yet. The next print issue deadline is August 15th, and electonic submissions are preferred at submissions@322review.org (up to 3 poems, each not to exceed 36 lines / Fiction up to 6k words, or 3-750 word stories, or you can tack a short-short onto a regular story in a submission). They also sound very open to mixed media work and hypertextual documents. Check out the website and see if its your cup of tea. I also really liked the poem Misplaced by Jill Jones. I had to read the line “placed after before / in the evening” a few times to get it, but I liked that. The method mirrored in the content of the poem. Or the other way around, whichever it is, it made me think a bit. A great indication of their ecclectic tastes when compared to the more straightforward Fein poem.

But the month is very, very young. But here’s a link if you’re bored. Follow Iamzeb on twitter to read my daily <140 character poems. Message me if you want to try the exercise of writing a poem a day that fits in the twitter format, and I’ll follow you.

That isn’t a real name. It sounds dumb, but if someone heard a rollerblader talking about their Full Truespin Fishbrain, which actually is a trick/spin combination, they’d think someone hit their head, and it may be true. But yeah, If anyone who stumbles on this post and feels like following me on twitter (IamZeb) to read my daily (or more frequently) posted twitter poems, by all means do it. If you too want to join in on the month’s exercise, send a message @iamzeb or whatever you do, so I can follow you and read your poems as well. Get a little network going.

Why a Twitter poem?

Why than you for asking. I personally think Twitter is kind of silly. I, personally, don’t need minute to minute updates on someone across the country petting their cat (then FEEDING it!). However, the Paper Hearts challenge to write a twitter poem struck an ‘exercise’ note for me. I’m not entirely sure why, but I flashed back to a class I took with Steve Kowit at Southwestern (if you’re in San Diego, DO IT! While you can at least, there’ve been rumors that Kowit may be retiring, and that will be a sad, sad day for the San Diego Poetry community) about the American Sentence.

What is an American Sentence?

Why I’m glad you asked that. Look it up. Or just take my word that it’s a poetic form originated by Allen Ginsberg as an adaptation of the Haiku to a more ‘American’ form of consumption: all at once.

What?

A prose-haiku. Listen already. An American Sentence is a 17 syllable prose poem. A (for lack of a better name) twitter poem will have to be 140 characters or less. Similar, eh? Why not. A variation of an American Sentence from syllabics to character length (remember, that includes spaces and punctuation).

What do I do?

Go to Twitter and start an account (quick process) or sign into you account. Send me a tweet *gag* [if you want to take part in the little Incendiary Lit Twitter Poem Month, updating whenever you feel like, but keep your poetics in mind. I really don’t care if you went to the grocery store unless you see Mark Twain poking among the meats in the refrigerator.] or just follow me for a little reading now and then in case you get bored, or to perhaps help spark a poem of your own, regardless of form.

Yes, the TV channel JWTNY is to blame for this bit of entertaining eye candy while Billy Collins reads his poems slightly drone-like.

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On Fire

Having been taught by fools, how else could I have ended up
but as I am? a man who panics at the sound of his own voice,
a blusterer, afraid that within the five-pointed maple leaf there lies
another name he never knew; ready, always, to be found wrong.

Listen: in my tenth year they put me in a room where one plane
watched another plane fly over a city. It was morning in both
places. In black & white at first the explosion looked like water
rising. Captured, they say, on film, as in: pulled out of time

so we can rewind it and watch it happen again, as in a memory,
as in: this is a memory we all have, these are our family pictures.
There was that kind of shame. As if the fire really had been stolen.
And sitting on the floor there was one boy who even earlier

that year came home to find his mother hanging from a rope
in the kitchen. What didn’t he know that he needed this film
to teach him? Already what he knew was enough to terrify
the teachers, so that they couldn’t look at him. But they also

couldn’t not look at him. As if he was an obscene pleasure.
And he was beautiful. Complete. But what he carried in him
seeped out as hate for anyone of the same sex as his mother.
It was that simple: even a fourth-grade mind could understand.

So the girls stayed away. And from the other side of the common
room, where the books full of numbers being added, subtracted
and divided were kept, our new teacher watched, helpless, knowing
he also needed this knowledge, but she couldn’t give it to him.

Which might be why she let me touch her. Because she couldn’t
get near him and my head against the antique white lace of her
dress was a good enough almost. Her hair was light brown, if I
remember correctly. Innocent is supposed to mean free from hurt

but it can also mean you don’t know what you’re doing. As when
I felt that touching her wasn’t enough and I wanted to press closer,
until someone felt pain, or until I passed through her dress and found
myself inside her. It didn’t matter if she was an adult and I was ten:

what I wanted wasn’t sex. Or not what I have learned to think sex
is. Her dress was made of a material called vintage, which meant
that although it had managed to avoid all the minor catastrophes
of red wine stain and hook snag, along with the major disasters

of history, no one had treated the cloth with chemicals, to make it
flame retardant And on the whole length of the hand-sewn inner seam
that started at her wrist and ran all the way down to her ankle,
no one had remembered to place even one small label warning:

if you touch the sleeve of this garment to the still-hot coils
of an electric stove, it will explode. Which is what happened.
There’s the land of scream you hear in movies. What I heard
twenty-seven years ago didn’t sound anything like that. It was

sharper and can’t be recorded. No matter how many times
you rewind the film. You keep going back and each time
there’s a little less there. Until the memory has become
the event. And how you feel about the memory. The materials

have burnt away. There was so much fabric and all of it on fire.
Her hair too, which was long, as I remember. She came running
from the faculty kitchen, as if she could escape what she was
turning into. But all she did was excite and encourage the flames.

by Andrew Feld

The flow of the narrative in this poem reminded me very much of a David Kirby, or Cambell McGrath poem, but mostly Kirby. The long compound sentences and the ands and the ands and the movement from one topic to the next. But one line really stuck out to me as an epigram of sorts was actually split between stanzas, and I think expertly so. One must be careful with statements of general fact in poetry. There is such a great risk of “Love is all you need” poetry gooeyness to infect direct observations, but this one got me (L21-22). “Innocent is supposed to mean free from hurt // but it can also mean you don’t know what you’re doing.” Friggan Word. The duality of words is a great tool of the poet, and this duality was well put to match the poem.

Willow Springs is a sweet literary journal from Eastern Washington University that publishes accessible and excellent poetry and prose. They’ve recently started a feature on their website that has the poet writing (at decent length) about their poem. Dorianne Laux is one of the best contemporary poets, and you should all be more familiar with her work. Dagnabbit. Here’s her feature at Willow Springs for her poem “S. Sgt Metz.”

ENJOY

This is a much larger issue than I could even claim to be able to address without decades of further reading, however, I can offer an amateur’s perspective. Whenever there are formal constraints on words

( first of all, of course, the non-spoken must be rendered into the spoken{written} which is a constraint, and into one language over another unless the poet and readers are sufficiently bilingual to understand slight linguistic/cultural characteristics of said un-translatable words, and then is bound by the constraints of grammar (unless you really feel like throwing caution to the wind or want to write in vernacular) and spelling and ARGH. When you REALLY look at it, poetry is a horribly constrained style of writing. Line breaks can’t be arbitrary, titles, punctuation and capitalization. What a friggan mess. Ignore ALL THIS)

the meaning of the poem can take a backseat, or be totally lost. And really, the meaning, or at least the moments of the poem are what’s important (if the meaning is less of the life-changing and more of the distraction-from-life genre), and form is the container of the words, not their meaning. You could kind of look at it like Bonsai Kittens. With photoshop (and grammar and poetic license) you can shove that kitten into a nearly imposible vase, but it’ll often lose the reality– the concreteness and the power of the words. There are two types of one dimensional poems (well, thousands, but for now lets go with 2) those which try to say too much, and those that don’t know aht they want to say.

What does this mean? Well damn. It’s tough. I like to off-quote TS Eliot and say poetry isn’t about the poet’s emotions but the poet’s ability to call up particular emotions in the reader. But it’s 2009 and TS Eliot is long dead. However, the actual quote is pretty apt still, so I’ll end with that:

“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” - T.S. Eliot

 

Here is an audio recording of Herni Cole reading his poem “Birthday” from a couple years ago. I liked it best when I listened to it with my eyes closed. The last image… no spoilers for that minute or so, and you know what, I’m not even posting the poem. No cheating. Even subconsciously, meandering eyes scanning ahead without you even realizing. Listen to the words in the exact order they were intended. Ch, ch-ch-ch, check it out.

Their new issue, 30.2 is out now with a slick cover of penguins wearing ties (but graphically slick, I like the black background, really makes the light blue letters pop, you know?). There’s a ton of great stuff in it, I’ll write more when I’ve read it through twice (instead of 1/3), but I’ve just been so into all the pieces so far from familiar new voices like Kevin Prufer, Emma Bolden, Matthew Dickman, Kim Addonizio, Bob Hicok, Nin Andrews and more. Friggan sweet I tell you. I’m especially taken with Matthew Dickman’s “Architecture poem,” (when green / apples pulled the sorrow from my chest after school /) and the surreal images in Kevin Prufer’s “Transparent Cities” but I haven’t even read the whole thing yet. I just wanted anyone who likes good reading to know ASAP that they should order this journal so they can have a bunch of great reading available as an alternative to the Dr. Phil book some relative with good intentions bought them for Christmas and keeps asking about. Go here and order the Indiana Review. It’s for your own good.

That You Arrive, Eventually, At the Insufficiency Of Just-Having-Been

by Anne Caston

The black-clad Amish walk, this August morning,
to the widow’s farm for the belling of the new bull.

Their daughters sing, their dogs bark
sharply, their sons strike stones with long sticks.

They pass her solemn house, its drawn shutters, black
hunting bunched at the gatepost, the porch

rail, the door. A rogue almond tree burns
gold and bronze beside the barn; the killed hog

swings from a bough of oak. Stiff sheets
sail on the line. The cock, sour

in his spurs, crows at nothing
and rushes the dogs.

And in her garden going to ruin: the shameless
blue stars of the morning glory blaze.

—

Amidst all the drabness implied, and the dark drab of the black bunting, this dreary colored poem contains some wonderful images and lines, but none better than the final image of the blue flowers against that mourning (this August morning). How shameless indeed! Wonderful. This poem was in Anne Caston’s collection Judah’s Lion which won the 2006 Cider Press Review Book Award. She is a core member of the faculty at University of Alaska at Anchorage’s low residency MFA program.

Chopped-Off Arm
by Hal Sirowitz

Don’t stick your arm out of the window,
Mother said. Another car can sneak up
behind us, & chop it off. Then your father
will have to stop, stick the severed piece
in the trunk, & drive you to the hospital.
It’s not like the parts of your telescope
that snap back on. A doctor will have to sew it.
You won’t be able to wear short sleeves.
You don’t want anyone to see the stitches.

Here is Hal Sirowitz reading the poem. This poem is from his book Mother Said (which is filled with such gems, as are My Therapist Said, and Father Said). Though I picture the character of Hal Sirowitz (as painted in the poems of Hal Sirowitz, which isn’t necessarily the real Hal) as a sort of cross between Albert Brooks and Woody Allen; consumately neurotic with a cast of outlandishly blunt people surrounding him. Very funny stuff.

As a senior project three students (Chrystal Hartberg, Jessica Tyson and Zebulon Huset) at California State University- Long Beach produced the following collection of poems and essays.

Though originally meant to be an alternative to the Best American Series, it changed slightly as the process of reading over a hundred literary magazines polished the shrine of subjectivity that is reading poetry. Instead the collection took on the theme of excellent entertainment and was printed for adviser William Mohr.

Digital images of the project are now online here, under the title Better than the Movies 2008.

A Crate of Oranges
by Tana Jean Welch

sat next to the artist every afternoon

as he sipped tea on the cafe patio.
The people of Neulengbach assumed he traveled with citrus

because bright things must be a painter’s constant companion.
Even when the war came and everyone succumbed

to wearing black
with a now-and-then splash of gun metal blue,

and the sound of the rock sparrow was replaced
by the wail of the young soldier’s widow

as she watched the King’s Guard, their posture spoiled
under the weight of oak and brass, load the coffin into the white carriage–

even then, the painter kept taking tea
with his box of happy, bulbous oranges,

so was credited with having a solid spirit.
But these people lived before the time art transformed a urinal,

before the time one could fly in a passenger jet, cruise the cloud-line
to see the earth for what it really is:

a patchwork of velvet: a brown, green, tourmaline grandmother’s quilt,
soft and innocuous, smooth

except where the cities are.
By the end of the funeral, the widow’s garter belt had slipped

causing her fishnet stocking to bunch at the right knee
of her long leg, reminding the painter of the cracked opal

in his mother’s pendant.

By the end of the war
they had pulled the painter from his house,

burnt his blue sketches and paintings of naked girls, naked boys,
arrested him for using oranges as bait–

even though the village children swore the oranges were juicier and sweeter
than the ones placed in their stockings at Christmas

when the evergreen firs are hauled in from the cold
and snow blinds all with a titanium white.

—

I couldn’t find out a whole lot about Tana Jean Welch without, you know, making an actual effort, but here are a couple more poems at La Fovea. This poem won 2nd place in Cutthroat’s Joy Harjo Poetry Prize, and was published in their Spring 2008 issue. This poem reminds me of Corrine Hales’ “Sunday Morning” in that for the majority of the poem you’re not sure what is going to happen, let’s call it the cuspiness. The poem seems to be tipping back and forth between the nostalgic turn and the ominous. The young soldier’s death/funeral and the whole backdrop seem very ominous, yet there are those “happy, bulbous oranges.” Another key word to note in the tone is “credited.” The painter is “credited” with having a solid spirit. A great word choice that indicates that though credited, there is an ulterior motive, and perhaps its only a symptom of today’s culture of suspicion, but ulterior motives make me think sinister. However, those are happy oranges and there was little more than atmosphere to convict the painter of anything underhanded… the quality of the writing keeps you glued to the page actually because nothing has happened, but stakes are piling up around the title: the happy oranges in the black and gun metal blue world.

I’m a big fan of the abrupt shift in a poem, in narrative poems especially; the jarring turn of events, the dramatic dissected because poetry, let’s face it, is somewhat mystic, it’s about leaving slight ambiguities, about connecting without dictating, the unsaid as much as the said and the said only the root of the experience. The blue sketches are an abrupt shift in the poem, like the mother’s call for silence in “Sunday Morning” and though never specifically indicated, they’re almost expected. The tenseness to the jump-moment of the poem. Where your facial expression changes, even if you’re reading the poem in public. That moment can only really be achieved when the tension in the poem is expertly crafted. It is easy to go over-the-top with dreary images, to get heavy-handed with metaphors, or to forget that there should be a reason for the shift, duality, humanity, something other than just a ‘ah, that’s messed up’ moment to them then nothing else.

Writing exercise: Try writing a poem that sets a pleasant image amidst a very dreary or dreadful background. Give the reader little of the pleasant image, (as in the crate of happy oranges) but that image will be the twisting point for the poem. Whether it’s something good like a type of muffin being sold in a bakery being used as secret code to help persecuted escape, or the more ominous negative side of the happy image, as so many seemingly positive things are being used for a much darker purpose it appears. Make sure that the cuspiness is woven into the atmosphere of the poem, the scenery, the mundane as unstated metaphors… Have at it!

The Grammar Lesson
by Steve Kowit

A noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does.
An adjective is what describes the noun.
In “The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz”

of and with are prepositions. The’s
an article, a can’s a noun,
a noun’s a thing. A verb’s the thing it does.

A can can roll - or not. What isn’t was
or might be, might meaning not yet known.
“Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz”

is present tense. While words like our and us
are pronouns - i.e. it is moldy, they are icky brown.
A noun’s a thing; a verb’s the thing it does.

Is is a helping verb. It helps because
filled isn’t a full verb. Can’s what our owns
in “Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.”

See? There’s almost nothing to it. Just
memorize these rules…or write them down!
A noun’s a thing, a verb’s the thing it does.
The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.

—

Why do I want to teach this poem? I like the idea of the format of a poem fitting the content. The villanelle has a line repetition pattern of [if you identify each line on the page with a number, repeating numbers indicating a repeated line] 123/451/673/891/10,11,3/12,13,1,3 (then of course there’s the rhyme scheme). The repetition in Kowit’s in his villanelle works doubletime as a mneumonic. Mneumonics, mantras and lists are great ways to work the necessary repetition of a villanelle or pantoum or triolet into the poem. To give the repetition reason. Another way to give the repitition of a formal poem is to use homonyms, and alternate punctuation to nuance the lines, but that’s another post and another poem. I think that the concept of the poem, a teaching-through-repetition villanelle is a very good one, and can be applied to many different things in many different poems by many different talented poets.

Steve Kowit is a poet, teacher, memoirist and friendly guy. His publications include The Dumbell Nebula (1999), Gods of Rapture ( 2006), The First Noble Truth (2007), and the wonderful craft book (a book in serious contention for the craft book I want to teach right away… but I’m still undecided) In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet’s Portable Workshop (1995).

Another Argument About the Impossible
by Lawrence Raab

Even if we agree in principle that a poem can be
about anything, you still want to claim
it cannot include space aliens,
since by their very nature (you insist)
they are silly. And even if belief
is a subject that’s stood the test of time,
a poem about a man who believes in space aliens
will be a poem about a man who is either
silly or demented. Belief requires
a world of consequence all around it:
men, women, nature, history, and so on.
Reality, of course, is another matter, but see
what happens (you continue) when these
are put together, as in: “My work
concerns the nature of reality, belief,
and space aliens.” It would be different
if we knew they were there, but we don’t,
and a poem cannot afford to adopt
such a wait-and-see attitude toward the world
which, after all, has provided so many
more compelling subjects. No (you conclude),
not even a poem that argues against them
can survive their presence,
not even if the aliens never appear,
never do or say anything, never threaten us
with their neutron blasters, never steal our women
to populate their planet, not even if their ships
remain hidden, and we are never taken up in them
to be probed and instructed, dazzled and released.

–

from his collection The Probable World, and also collected in Visible Signs; New and Selected Poems. Buy them both for under $2 at amazon. You won’t regret it. They’re great. Very easy to read, and very entertaining.

–

Cool huh? I bet most people have something to say to the speaker about the concept of extra-terrestrial life, or you laughed and thought “yes,” *sniff from the snifter of cognac* “a poem about an alien, how wickedly absurd.” Then the cackle that can only be made with a glinting gold monocle string dangling in front of the left cheek. But, that is covered in the poem. Because although it’s a discussion about discussion about unknowable (and therefore impossible to prove or disprove) things, it leaves a back door by saying “It would be different / if we knew they were there, but we don’t,” because of course, now, the concept of at least some form of alien life in the incalculable depths of space seem all but assured. However, by including that statement, it recalls the time before modern space research when aliens were Metalunans in shiny silver suits and massive foreheads– like the speaker in the poem says “silly.” So a poem that argues for aliens, and against aliens can’t survive the reality of aliens… if they float down one day in their ship with a computerized Rosetta Stone and open the world of earth in on a galactic empire, everything will change. But this poem isn’t arguing for or against aliens. It’s arguing for the argument, and for the concept of a discussion about unknowable things.

The poem is one I’ve come to associate closely with Raab’s style. Very conversational, even including dialog, presents a question in an anecdotal fashion, and ends with a series of images. Not a bad way to lay out a poem if you ask me.

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Writing exercises:

Write a poem that is your take on aliens. Place it in an anecdotal, or at least loosely narrative setting. Raab’s poem uses poetry to root the discussion in the real, for your poem use current events. Be it high or low culture, root this opinion about aliens in a very specific time, so that even if they do descend, this poem could possibly survive as a ‘pre-alien’ historical document. Or, at least a glimpse into a specific time with an alien tilt.

Write a poem that follows the general pattern of this poem. A narrative poem that digresses a number of times, that presents an argument, or concept that is left somewhat in the air for debate, that is very conversational in tone, and ends with an anaphoric word and series of 3-4 images.