Lyric Life

I found this poem while I was seeing my dad through his death. I thought of it a lot during those awful months. I thought about what I needed to apologize for. I thought about what he needed to apologize for. I thought how no fish would ever make it up between us--but how right Ellen Bass was to make it a meal, an apology, a bony fish no one wants but everyone needs. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore Ellen Bass's poem "How To Apologize," just recently published in THE NEW YORKER. This work hit me where I live. And its construction is nothing short of genius.

How can something published in 1968 be so 2021? It can because it's a lyric poem by Bernadette Mayer, a poet whose work may well define what I think is great about lyric poetry. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take a look at this fabulous and very adult sonnet by one of the best American poets working still today. Rage? You bet! But in sonnet form.

I'm back from a long hiatus. I didn't mean to go on one. My dad died. Or as I keep saying, he went over a cliff and took me with him. I wanted to record this podcast episode because it's about a poem I said over and over to myself this summer as I helped him die. It's also one of the last things I ever said to him. I hope you'll find it as moving and lasting as I did. It sustained me. I couldn't ask Dickinson for any more. I couldn't ask lyric poetry for any more.

A warning, first off: this lyric poem has language, imagery, and incidents that are difficult to bear. If you have children with you, you'll want to save this episode for another time. Hayley Mitchell Haugen's poem, "Would You Please Stop Whistling, Please?" brought me up short the moment I found it. It's an example of control that I cannot imagine. It's also emotionally insightful in ways I wish I were. I hope you'll give it a listen, despite the rough subject matter. This is confessional poetry at its best: it reveals its speaker even more than the speaker believes she's being revealed. I don't know whether this is true confession or not. It doesn't matter. It hits. And that's what the best of lyric poetry does.

It takes a brave writer to lead the charge against Emily Dickinson. Especially in my books! You know how much I love Dickinson. But I may love Caitlin Seida's riff off a famous Dickinson poem just as much. This poem became something of my mantra when I was recently in Texas for a month, helping my dad die. I had no idea I'd do what I did. I didn't even know he was that sick. He went over a cliff and took me with him. I used lines from this poem over and over again to help me get up off the couch and go give him his next round of pain or nausea meds. I hope you'll find the audacity in this poem as compelling as I do. And I hope you'll understand that hope lasts, like a sewer rat. It survives in the worst places. Because that's the very nature of hope.

Here's a poem that's deceptively small. It's actually a sonnet, broken into an octet and a sestet. And it does what sonnets do best: it turns the world strange. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore Donna Hilbert's short poem "Rosemary" on this episode of the podcast Lyric Life. We'll look at the ways Hilbert encodes loss into imagery--and talk about the ways we can write more effectively about loss and love, following Hilbert's example. If you want to learn more about Donna Hilbert, check out her website, donnahilbert.com.

Ted Kooser has been called part of the "Midwestern poetry revival" in the U.S., his poems plainsong truth-telling that somehow avoid the pitfalls (and pratfalls?) of academic poetry. But this poem, "The Old People," is definitely full of classical and poetic allusions. It also has a complicated structure. In other words, all that "plainsong" stuff is sitting over some very heady material. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take a look at this poem from Kooser's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, DELIGHTS & SHADOWS.

I've just come off teaching Emily Dickinson's poetry in two-hour seminar segments over eight weeks--and her art has done to me what it always does to me: It's broken my brain. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore the poem on which I ended those eight weeks. It's a wildly understated statement, wry and winking, that truth might be derived ecologically, geographically, even horticulturally. What if the self is not what it is but mostly where it is? What if you're made up of where you're from, more than what you think? And not where you're front in terms of economics or education. Where you're from in terms of the flowers and birds you've lived with as a child (and maybe as an adult, too).

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this poem from a working poet, Tamara Madison: "What Now Is Like." It's a gentle exploration of the experience of the "now," the only way it can be experienced, in metaphor--and together. It's a poem that becomes quantum, becomes its own "now," and offers us a way to stop time, the one thing "now" can never offer us. This is a great poem for the coming end of the pandemic. It's full of hope. Full of linguistic pyrotechnics. And full of now. If you want to know more about Madison's poetry, check out her website: tamaramadisonpoetry.com.

Dungy's magnificent poem, "Let me," published just this month in The New Yorker (April, 2021) is a terrifying glimpse into the problem of living in the United States: everything's real and everything's a metaphor. And when you're in that spot, the house can only catch on fire. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I slow-walk through this terrific poem that seems so suited for this moment in U. S. history--and seems to explore the very thing so much of us can't comprehend: how can the dream and the reality, the metaphor and the story, exist at the same moment? The poem is based on a technique as old as Homer: ring structure. It's playing with time to ring the moments and deepen them. But it does more than I could ever do. I'm a writer of narrative. I can make sediments. It takes poets to turn them into granite.

If you know this podcast, you know how much I love the poetry of Emily Dickinson. No, more than love. How much in awe of it I am. I'm in the middle of teaching eight two-hour sessions on her poems--and they're doing to me what they always do: they break my brain. How did anyone write like this in the nineteenth century? This poem is one I just finished teaching in a larger set of poems about her relationship with Romanticism and nature. It's an oft-anthologized poem but one that gets at the core of some of what her art does. "There's a certain slant of light" takes all our expectations of nature poetry, Christian imagery, and personal insight and turns them all on their head. Or worse, on our head, forcing us to realize that revelation is not all it's cracked up to be.

Here's a very short poem by one of my favorite poets, Galway Kinnell: "Prayer." Just three lines, no invocation, no "amen"--instead, an elliptical, lyrical strangeness that gets to the heart of being human, summed up in a form that's usually addressed to the deity. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I work out the ways this poem has hit me in recent weeks, the ways it's become a mantra in my mind as I go about my days. I'm not a religious person. It's all the prayer I could ever recite. But it's enough.

If you know this podcast, LYRIC LIFE, you know I love grit in all its poetic forms. This poem, by the well-known B. H. Fairchild, is a plainsong statement about grit--or more like, about the ambivalence of grit. How do you escape the world you're in? Is it important to shine a light on it? And what sort of light? Sunlight? Or manufactured light? Because for a poet, it's all manufactured light. And what if that's not enough. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this gorgeously evocative, carefully constructed poem about shifting time, the pull of false hopes, and the truth about light. It can only get you so far.

Esteban Rodríguez' poem "9 El Barril" stopped me cold when I found it on Twitter a while back. It's an elegantly crafted poem that explores the divide between a young boy and his drunk father, out in the yard, burning everything in sight. The poem is caught on divides in every direction, exploring those gaps and silences through deceptively simple language that keeps moving in and out of poetic forms and rhythms. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this lyric poem by a young poet in Austin, Texas. The poem catches me up short, decenters me as a white reader, and offers the truth about what happens when you see your father for who he really is. If you'd like to see more of Rodríguez' work, check out his latest collection of poetry here: https://sundress-publications.square.site/product/the-valley-by-esteban-rodriguez-pre-order-/145?cs=true&cst=custom (https://sundress-publications.square.site/product/the-valley-by-esteban-rodriguez-pre-order-/145?cs=true&cst=custom) And for more gritty poetry (the stuff I love), check out http://pidgeonholes.com/ (pidgeonholes), where this poem was first published.

Grace Paley's evocative and elegiac lyric poem, "When I Was Asked how I Could Leave Vermont In The Middle Of October," is a haunting statement of the truth we in New England live: that we yearn for that gorgeous moment when the leaves are turning orange and red, when in reality death is pressing in, when we're reminded that the world will come back again next year for another go at this gawdy show while we will just be another year older. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this spare, sly, witty poem that dares to answer the fundamental question: How come I have to endure so much beauty when my body is aging away from me?

Winter is too often seen as a curse. It's certainly a curse in Texas while I'm recording this episode. But it's also thought a curse too often where I live in rural New England. But it doesn't have to be. How do you practice gratitude when you don't know what your grateful for? Or to whom? Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this gorgeous, evocative poem by Dayna Patterson about winter, a mother-to-mother poem, in which "thank you" is a repeated refrain to "our lady of snow forts," the one who makes winter possible. I found this poem in the magazine Literary Mama. Please check out the magazine https://literarymama.com/ (here).

Imagistic poetry is tough. It doesn't have that storytelling structure which gives us easy access to its emotional space. But this poem, James Miller's "Song in Flood Time," is just not to be missed. It's modern, current, evocative. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I try to do it justice. I found this poem by accident--or almost. I found it in a tweet from SCOUNDREL TIME, an online journal, part of their "land and weather" series. I read it--and couldn't stop rereading it. So it's here in the podcast Lyric Life. I hope you find its emotional space as glorious as I do.

In this time of Covid, and maybe in all times of human existence, we experience these great emotions of love and grief. And we have only one way to explain them: in storytelling. But there's a deep problem here: we can't experience them in the same way we try to explain them. We can't tell our way out of the fundamental emotions of the human experience. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I take an in-depth look at Mark Doty's gorgeous poem about grief and loss, "The Embrace." It's one of the most honest, heart-felt revelations about loss I've ever read on this podcast.

This Emily Dickinson poem has been on my mind a lot lately--maybe because of the current political climate, maybe because of some personal things, maybe because things come to the mind when they do! This poem is about light and dark, of course. But it's more about living in the dark. What happens when there's no light? How do you go about your life? Dickinson has a few answers. Or maybe not answers. Maybe metaphors. She's the bravest I know. She gropes toward an answer, even in the dark. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this episode of LYRIC LIFE as I explore this gorgeous, troubling, and, well, true poem.

Nancy Cross Dunham's poem "What I'm Learning About Grief" was part of an NPR challenge to find poems that dealt with grief during the lockdowns of Covid. It's a quiet, devastating exploration of the ways out of grief: from cliché to something quite different, something that is redemptive, never forgetting that the "next night" is always just ahead.

John Haines wrote some of the most gorgeous, "natural landscape" poetry in U. S. literary history. The heir of Frost and maybe even Whitman, he took on his Alaskan world and transformed it into something mythic. This small lyric poem is not about the "outback" where he made his life. Rather, it's about an urban world turned upside down by a giant snowfall--about the ways the natural world can still interrupt the civilized myth we all believe, about the ways that our precarious perch in our urban lives can give way under the weight of something as light as snow. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for a reading and exploration of this provocative and evocative poem.

Pádraig Ó Tuama's gorgeous meditation on being is a fit lyric poem for this year of Covid--or really, for any year, for any moment, when the human question is not what you do, nor even who you are, but simply how you go about being. Not the business of being. The rest of it. The silence of it. The peace of it. The best lyric poetry opens up a space for being. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I explore this quiet and comforting meditation by a contemporary Irish poet and truth-teller.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's strange, broken poem, "Constantly Risking Absurdity" risks all the absurdity imaginable: a poem published in 1958, that uses Old English poetics (think "Beowulf") to explain the way the creative act risks the death of "Beauty" in the "empty air of existence." It's a haunting tribute to what it takes to make something, to create something, to find yourself risking it all for beauty, whether at your computer, in the studio, in the gardens, or in the kitchen.

Gerard Manley Hopkins' gorgeous sonnet "Hurrahing in Harvest" is a testament to the way language itself remakes the world--in Hopkins' case, infusing it with the stuff of divinity. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this episode of LYRIC LIFE in which I look over this beautiful piece of nineteenth-century poetry--and grant you permission to hoard as many books as you like.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's haunting and daunting (and blessedly short) lyric poem "Spring" may be the poem we need right now: an expression of post-World War I PTSD, told by a speaker out of sync with the seasons, out of step with the world. It feels like this moment. It reads like this moment. Join me, Mark Scarbough, as I explore the wild truth that Millay appears to convey so easily--although there's never anything easy about telling the truth.

Here's the oft-anthologized, oft-assigned Wallace Stevens poem, "The Emperor of Ice-Cream." I recorded an episode on this poem--and then trashed it because the poem kept me up at night. I soon realized that the way I've always seen it doesn't make sense of it, leaves me wanting more. So here's the poem and what it means and how what it means changes with each day--like ice cream. Here today, gone in a flash.

Zoe Leonard's 1992 prose poem has been making the internet rounds again--and it has hit me between the eyes. I'm glad I found it now. I couldn't have heard it when it was written. But it lands in my gut and makes me realize how much a great writer can imagine a better world--and how much I want to live in that world. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for a fast episode about a monumental piece of writing, as true now as when it was written.

Sylvia Plath's early poem "Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" shows her already working at an extremely advanced level in poetry. This poem is always read as some sort of debate between reality and the imagination. And I hesitated on it for months because I was trapped in that academic expertise. But the poem is actually an imaginative and even ironic engagement with the world, a gorgeous piece of craft from a young poet already at the top of her game.

I've started a new podcast, WALKING WITH DANTE. I want to take a slow walk through Dante's masterwork, the greatest work in Western literature (hey, let me have it!), a long poem that most people call THE DIVINE COMEDY, but that he just called COMEDY. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, on this brand-new show. I promise to be a good guide. I promise you won't get lost. Don't worry: it's just a walk across the known universe. But we're going slow. We'll rarely be out of breath. Rarely. And what a treat, to walk slowly through COMEDY. Because life is all about the happy ending. You just have to get there, step by step.

Wallace Stevens' late poetry is charged with quantum reality: fragmented, expansive, and always drawn toward the hope of a unified field. In this poem, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm," Stevens details the ultimate reading experience--in which the reader becomes the book, the book becomes the world, and the reader is still left wanting the perfect reading experience. Join Mark Scarbrough as he explores this deceptively simple poem in which desire is the worm in the system--because desire is the system.

Here's an early poem by Wallace Stevens, part of his HARMONIUM collection, "Disillusionment at Ten O'Clock." It's an imagistic poem about both the failure of the imagination and its success--and about why poetry matters (particularly after that last episode about Marianne Moore's "Poetry"). Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I dance with and around this short but complex poem by one of the United States' best poets.

What more could anyone say about Moore's poetry? Especially about this poem, the bane of Literature 101--and a poem that's too often presented as far simpler than it is. Even the famous "definition" of poetry--"imaginary gardens with real toads in them"--isn't as obvious as it first seems. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as I work my way through this seductive, elliptical poem by one of the United States' best modernist poets.

Literature: so innocuous, right? Except it's not. On this episode of Lyric Life, I take on Blake's "The Lamb," a companion piece to his poem "The Tyger"--and a companion episode to the one on this podcast about that other poem. There, I told you a conversion narrative. Here, in a poem about innocence, I tell you some of the rest of my story: a descent into hell. Literature's not innocuous. It's dangerous. Every word of it.

Stephen Dunn's poem about a guardian angel who walks off the job--and then comes back--is a lyric poem for this moment, for a time when chaos rules, when the bad seems to overwhelm the good, when the question of why you do right when it doesn't seem to matter is a question that none of us can avoid. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, in this episode of Lyric Life for a lyric poem that's so true, it hurts--and it all the right ways.

Molly Fisk's gritty, honest poem, "Dark Rum & Tonic," is about what you get when you finally grow up, when you get older, when you've been through the wreck and come out the other side. You get invisibility. And much more. You get the chance to talk to yourself. To see yourself. And to write yourself. Join me for a gorgeously crafted poem about the losses we face--and the human ways we survive.

I've danced around Sylvia Plath--or around her absence on this podcast--for a long time, mostly because I can't stand the way people approach her poetry. This early poem shows exactly the sort of poet she was: a master at her craft, not just the object of pity or ire. This poem about coming home is brilliant: evocative, shattering, and finally, yes, shattered, too. It's a great place to start to see Plath, not as a biography, but as an artist.

Denise Levertov's evocative, small, oblique prayer is an amazing piece of craft: an honest statement of the gray that is adulthood but also a wily little game in which she works us readers around and around and finally into the gray, almost without our knowing it. She gets us to the place of "I don't know" before we even know it and so accomplishes exactly what lyric poetry should: she surprises us with truth in language AND truth in form.

Here's one of the most anthologized poems out there, almost a cliché by this point. Yet William Blake's "The Tyger" is my conversion story. I can locate the moment I ditched one life and started another right in these words. Because that's what words can do. Should do. Will do.

Poem #374 is in some ways a companion poem to the last poem on this podcast, #373, "This world is not Conclusion." They appear on facing pages of one of her hand-written booklets--but this poem is fuller, more visualized, a crazy world of fashion and flowers, the essence of summer. Which inevitably ends. And ends right where it should: in the poet's lap.

Dickinson's magnificent poem "This World is not conclusion" stands as a statement of doubt in a world of faith, or of faith in a world of doubt, or of a different kind of faith in a world where everyone's so very certain. The poem is mostly a testament to her skill as a skilled writer of nuance, irony, and voice.

What if we need other people, not to make life more meaningful, but to make it less so? What if life alone becomes fraught, difficult, and, well, "allegorical," as Kenyon puts it, when we're left alone? What if the danger of quarantine is not too little meaning but too much?

We read this poem at our Passover seder every year, a meditation on what it is to be human, on the work it takes to put one foot in front of the other, even when you're looking at dry land. That work is harder than you think. And more human.

Join me for a conversational, evocative poem, ostensibly about gin, but really about the nature of time--and the final compensation we get in this life. Not causality, not reason, not rationality, but something more winsome, more redemptive.

There's no better love poet that e e cummings. He continually pushed beyond cliché to find the surprising ways love makes sense--and doesn't. Join me as I explore one of his most beautiful love poems about the ways we indwell each other even when the universe is screaming the message "apart."

A poem that has stuck with me since I first saw it in The New Yorker back in 2003, Robert Pinsky's "Antique" shows the bombast of love, the way we (almost have to) mythologize it--and the collapse of that myth-making into a shared moment of beauty, one between the view and the beloved, one between the poet and us.

Dickinson's meditation on the safety of the grave is a theological bombshell. The members of the resurrection sleep safe in their tombs. But when you make your life about safety, don't you miss out of the mad chaos of time and the world itself? And what if the resurrection doesn't come? You're still safe. And cold. Listen in for my take on this incredibly volatile and well-crafted poem.

Philip Levine's deceptively simple "The Simple Truth" lays out what makes us human: the ability to taste simple boiled potatoes, seasoned with butter and salt. It has been a part of my life for decades now. It is lodged in my soul. I can't wait to share it with you.

Emily Dickinson's short poem, the third of the four she sent to Thomas Wentworth Higginson to begin their relationship, is a salvo right across his bow. She either takes apart his misogyny, or his elite editorial status, or both, and more--because, after all, this is Dickinson's writing. It never says just one thing--except her rage at and acceptance of her situation.

Elizabeth Bishop's poem is a funny (or maybe sardonic) take on loss, a world-weary glance on pain that is too quickly over-dramatized. Except I bought her advice whole-heartedly. I once set out to live this poem. With varying results. Including, ultimately, this podcast.

Stevens' poetry is always weird, strange, elliptical. He may even surpass himself in this poem about an empty jar set in the wilderness of Tennessee. What does this jar do? Nothing less than bring meaning to the world. Or maybe rob it of all meaning.

Luke Kennard's very contemporary poem almost overwhelms its reader with imagery--until the poem makes a strange turn into story, incipient, vague, but visible, connecting back to itself and to "us," the ones made of nothing but dust.