Singapore

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
     in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
     rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
     neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
     which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
     hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Copyright @ 1990 by Mary Oliver. First published in House of Light, Beacon Press. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems, Volume One, Beacon Press.

This poem was posted to my office door during the years I worked as Staff Support for a university composition program, supporting my husband through graduate school. At that time, graduate students and professors surrounded me, and many saw me as a secretary, nothing more. Like anyone else, I hoped I would one day arrive where I wanted to be and that this was simply a stopping place. I was always a grad student’s wife, uncertain about my place in the world.

What I love about this poem is its wide social significance. I didn’t post it on my door to remind others that my job didn’t define me. It was a reminder to not judge others by the jobs they perform. My position, though it may have paid more, did not make me a better person than a custodian or groundskeeper. This poem is a lesson in humility: though the work of another person may disgust her, the speaker realizes that she is no better than the woman because she can flee (“I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket”). The janitor’s smile is only for the speaker’s sake; her hair becomes as beautiful as the wing of a bird because she is human, not because she cleans toilets. The “darkness” that is “ripped” from the speaker’s eyes is the darkness associated with dirtiness, and, more possibly, class distinctions.

Though the title is important in defining place and how we, as readers, might visualize the woman in the poem, I think that is where its significance ends. Since the woman we meet through the speaker never utters a word, acting as a silent movie character, she could very well be any woman cleaning any airport anywhere in the world. What is most significant is the way in which the speaker argues against how the larger culture has taught her to treat a janitor or anyone working a job that would make her cringe, and how she accepts this woman as part of the world, as a human among humans, in the only way she knows how: through a poem.

Hardy’s poem is not the steel chambers, the currents, the moon-eyed fishes. Hardy’s poem is not even the gilded gear, or the vaingloriousness—as he probably wanted it to be. “Convergence of the Twain” is, in fact, the sea-worm, crawling “grotesque” and “slimed”, though Hardy’s description of the worm as “dumb” and “indifferent” is hardly appropriate. I think we can cleave that off, chalk it up to his lack of a cutting room floor.

Had the executors of Hardy’s estate not burned his letters and notebooks, we may have more insight into those two little words, those nagging things that hold the poem back. Any middle of the road workshop worth its salt would have led Hardy to cut those vagueries—the worm’s presence in the poem is what brings me back to it time after time. The worm is hardly “indifferent,” though he may in fact be “dumb.” That’s the fault of his biology.

Hardy, who famously argued that “Peace is poor reading,” gives us very little of it in “Convergence of the Twain.” From the (admittedly overwrought) “salamandrine fires” of the foundries that stitched the Titanic and the “shadowy silent distance” of the Atlantic ocean, we are forced to swallow a picture of the wreck of the Titanic that is at once capital-N Natural, small-n natural, terrifying, even Calvinist. Forget the sweet pink cheek of the movie star, or the grip of the blonde boy stowaway—forget the murky algae-swamped submersibles shining lights across “the mirros meant / to glass the opulent,” this is the picture of the Titanic I love: a ship that grows in “stature” and “grace” like the boy Christ in his great Lost Weekend. Stately, sharp, tragic, terrified.

BIO: Will Roby is a poet and playwright from Texas. His poems have appeared at Stirring, Carte Blanche, anti-, and Tri-Quarterly.

“Ariel”— Microessay

“Ariel” is a poem steeped in silence and movement, by which I don’t mean the literal horse ride it’s famously about, but rather, the way Plath speeds the language up, and slows it down to stretch out time. This has something to do with a camera—“Ariel” is a poem that occupies a lot of space in my brain, a poem I can walk into if I want, or look at like a film. When I do this, when I look at it, it’s like a camera is zooming in & panning out, turning seconds into minutes, minutes into days.

Or maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe rather than stretching out time, Plath somehow manages to capture eternity, which is outside of time, which is timeless. This is also about silence— there is something wildly synesthetic about “Ariel,” the whole experience melded into one big thing that you can’t unpack—so silence and time and sight and flight are all the same. The poem begins, “Stasis in darkness.”, and there it is: Timelessness, silence, suspension, stasis, the whispery triple S telling us everything we need to know about a vast, packed emptiness, a time before action, when the action is somehow already known, but not yet done. The time before a poem is written, but just as it’s engendered. and then that period, that full stop, that line break— I can hear the silence of it. It sounds like a thunderclap; gunshot before a race.

Then, of course, we’re off: “split furrows,” “blood mouthfuls,” “shadows;” Plath tells us early that this strange landscape is “substanceless,” a word she essentially coined. This is a place where the only constant is change—in thirty-one lines, we go from total stasis to flight, from pure kinesis to annihilation, a place where whatever we touch, we fuse to—and now I see I’ve lapsed unintentionally to the plural pronoun, something I think Plath intended, cheeky, bitchy genius that she was—“Ariel” is one hell of a wild ride, a poem where the speaker and the reader are just as connected as the speaker and her horse, the speaker and her force.

One hell of a wild ride, yes, but totally, perfectly controlled. If you can find a poem as flawlessly executed, without one word out of place, I’d like to see it. Levis once spoke of Plath’s genius as, “an instrument of some kind,” an “otherness” she could pick up at will. To me, it’s as though she wears her otherness like a dress, a total fusion where words are dimensional, where she, where we, for a timeless minute, can be anything we desire.

BIO: Emily Van Duyne is a poet and mom, living in Texas. Her poems have recently appeared in Diagram, Anon, Solstice, and Naugatuck River Review.

When I moved to Berlin, I hoped blogging would help me come to terms with my new surroundings. Living abroad is an enriching experience for a poet, but it’s also traumatizing. You lose yourself to it, you fortify yourself against it, and (hopefully) you eventually negotiate a personal relationship with it.

That goes for your own writing, but also the literature you consume. I wanted a platform where I could write about the fascinating (sometimes, to an American eye, profoundly weird) book culture I’m immersed in, much of which is otherwise completely inaccessible in English.

Which is how Readux, was born. What started as a modest personal blog developed into a multi-contributor site with an editorial concept: Readux is a Berlin-based online publication with English-language reviews, interviews, and articles on German and French books and events.

When people read Readux’s about page, “literary therapy for the lingually displaced” seems to be the line that catches their eye. It’s funny, but it’s also true. Sometimes I feel as if, before I can process anything in German, I have to write about it in English.

But there’s another kind of “literary therapy for the lingually displaced,” that’s indispensable for expats like me — the network of literary blogs like 32 Poems’ that connect me to a culture I feel a part of, rather than the well-integrated outsider I am in Germany.

I recently wrote a couple of Readux entries on perceptions of race and diversity in the German literary world — they’re critical pieces, and they bring a distinctly American perspective with them — how could I have written them without understanding the situation in the US? Keeping up with the controversy surrounding Claudia Rankine’s indictment of Tony Hoagland’s “The Change” at AWP is in some ways as essential to my understanding of German literary society as reading the culture section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung each Sunday.

What I’m talking about is ballast, something I can push against, fall back on, use to check my own reactions to the constant flood of foreign media I’m swimming in. And then there’s the poetry; the longer I’m gone, the more urgently I feel the need to know the essential beating heart of American poetry right now, and the more magazines like 32 Poems mean to me.

Partly it’s an identity issue: if I’m an American among Germans, and a poet writing an awful lot about prose, I’d better understand American poetry if I want to know who I am. But it’s also about feeling at home and remaining connected to the things that made me want to engage with books in the first place. Sounds like great therapy to me.

Stop by Readux between Thursday March 31 and Sunday, April 3, 2011 to enter to win an illustrated copy of Robert Walser’s Answer to an Inquiry from Ugly Duckling Presse.

BIO: Amanda DeMarco’s poetry is forthcoming in The Believer and elsewhere. In 2009 she moved to Berlin on a Fulbright Grant. In addition to editing Readux, she writes reviews and articles on German book culture and international publishing for a variety of print and online venues. Her very first publication was in 32 Poems.

Okay, a topic. Blogs should have topics, no? My second collection of poems came out recently, and I tried to notify everybody I know without being an egocentric poet pain-in-the-butt. I gave a long email list to Story Line Press of maybe 400 email addresses, maybe one twentieth of them no longer real email addresses. But these are people whom I am in contact with. Nevertheless, I immediately (within two weeks of the announcement) sold a grand total of around 10 books. And all these people that I KNOW. And I also posted the announcement on my Facebook page!!! I was sort of thinking the “what if” of perhaps replacing one of Mary Oliver’s five books in the top five selling poetry books. Not really, but ten books?

Here’s the thing. Not too long ago, I was that guy who rarely would buy new books of poetry, partly because I was a poor poet who had little money, but partly because of some sort of mental block on buying poetry. People don’t bat an eyelash when buying a novel, but a book of poems?? We wince, we gnash our teeth, we, perhaps, begrudgingly, lay out that fifteen bucks for a book that we might actually read over and over again. Unlike that novel that we’ll probably read once. Why don’t people buy poetry? It’s embarrassing to me to be in a poet’s house and see a tiny bookshelf of poems. They should be spilling all over the place. Why don’t people (especially poets) buy it? How do we get past this?

On a side note, I have to say that any teacher of poetry should require students to buy at least two books by living poets (and a poetry magazine) every semester. Especially when a Chemistry book is $150. Just to be FAIR, we ought to have students buy 10 poetry books. That would do something for poetry sales. Yet the teacher probably shouldn’t force the students to buy the teacher’s poems!

I’m not trying to guilt anybody into buying my book. Do NOT, under any circumstances, buy my book of poems. I forbid you, dear reader. But buy somebody else’s book of poems today, or get a subscription to a magazine (32 POEMS) whose poems are worth reading. Don’t be a cheapskate. Well, be a cheapskate, for we all need to conserve, but be liberal when it comes to poetry. Why not?

Everyone, feel free to vent or rail or twitter or do whatever it is we do on these computer devices.

Your “friend”,

John Poch