7 Poems responding to 7 Poets

The idea for this blog post came about because of the tremendous encouragement I received from posting a poem dedicated to Mary Oliver on a social media page honoring her.

After reading the works of hundreds of poets, deciding my poems were totally out of sync, and giving up on the genre I’d loved since childhood, I ran across a little book by Mary Oliver with accessible poems I related to so well that I began to write again. Naturally, I wanted to acknowledge her work, which, at the time, used the unique format I mimicked in this poem:

 

Late Night with a Seasoned Poet
            after reading Mary Oliver

I cannot reach you
  at five a.m. when you spring
   awake to watch a summer rose

 fall into a pink-petaled
  lake where fishes bloom.
    I'm not a morning

person unless a winter-
  less night yawns & stretches
    into dawn with jarring songs 

of owls & whippoorwills
  and the charming squeak of
    a bat. Outlined at dusk,

 its soaring silhouette
  intersects the evening
    sky, circling insects

 and other small mysteries
  revealed to me before the
    pink-pollen light recedes.

                                         And then,
                                   everywhere,
                             everywhere,

     black roses blossom: hybrids
   cultivated from a long, wild
growing season of the night.

Mary Sayler, from Living in the Nature Poem and A Gathering of Poems

 

Although he’d unfairly fallen out of favor in the late 20th century, the work of Carl Sandburg drew me, too, because, like Mary Oliver, his poems were accessible and his metaphors apt. For example, his famous fog coming in on cat feet resulted in this response:

Weathering Sandburg 

The fog comes in cat
fur: pale gray Persian
with traffic sounds
rolled into the round
core of a purring rug,
each end opening to
skies of Siamese blue.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

As I continued to discover poets whose work I wanted to read more than once, poetry books by Wallace Stevens started to appear on my bookshelves. His intriguing titles and love for Florida (my almost-native-home) evoked this poem:

 

Landscape Loved by Wallace Stevens 

If you could fly over \ yards and yards
of green lace lining the Gulf and Space
Coasts, you would see low-lying bands
of land seeding the sea with pockets blue-
beaded with water, and you’d wonder how
one more word could fit into the shell-
shaped pattern, hemmed with canals, and
not unravel beneath the weight of so many
people pushing the delicate fabric, poking
the intricate design, picking at flaws not
found in winter-bound spools of wool.

Mary Sayler, from Living in the Nature Poem and A Gathering of Poems

 

As a writer and poetry-lover, I’ve often aspired to saying as much as possible in as little space as possible. So, with that in mind, you can guess why Walt Whitman’s longer-than-long poems didn’t initially appeal to me! But then, his poems happened to be the only ones in a bookshop in the beach town where we were vacationing for the weekend. 

Reading this poet-ahead-of-his-times, I discovered the incredible inclusiveness of his poetry. My response to him came right when I’d found I liked reading and writing prose poems (aka paragraph poems), but the impetus for the following poem came when I caught a glimpse of someone who looked like a photo of Whitman.

 

Leaving Walt at the Mall

Coming out of Dunkin’ Donut, I walked right by Walt Whitman without even speaking. You know how he likes to include everyone in a conversation and can go on and on, and I just wanted to get home before my caffeine let down. Later I felt bad about giving him nothing more than a nod, especially since I’m sure his driver’s license expired long ago. He’s been gone for over 100 years now and was almost that old when he died, so I could have at least offered him a ride somewhere, even though, by his very nature, he might not like being confined in this little boxcar of a poem.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

Interestingly, a contemporary of Walt’s, Emily Dickinson’s life and poems were almost the exact opposite of his! While he traveled widely and embraced fully almost everything, Emily lived a rather self-contained, reclusive life in New England where her poems resulted from penetrating observations of people. Often this included a breathless approach, dry wit, and the musicality of ballads.

 

Emily Dickinson Dips Ink

The music breaks
crystal.

Shards
strike the page
with spikes and slivers.

Vermont maples
explode
red and gold 
with no syrup
to make the fragments stick.

A dark stare
from a paper-white face
peers
at that bruise beneath
your left rib.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

While still enamored with prose poem-writing and intent on discovering poets whose lives and cultures contrasted with my own, I ran across the sensitive, insightful, and soulful poems of Attila Jozsef. In his poem, "The Dog, for instance, the creature and the poet morph into one. Anyway, I hope you will look up his work on the Internet and become familiar with him and, indeed, all the poets honored in this post.

 

Scavengers
   after reading Attila Jozsef by Attila Jozsef

Attila the Hungarian poet, I really love you. Please
believe me before you throw yourself beneath that
train. The fright of flying freight crushes my reading
of your prose poems – poems poised with insight
and odd juxtaposition. I try to rescue the paragraphs
you pose from extermination, reeling as I read. What
can I do but pet The Dog you left behind, ragged and
muddy, ready to avenge your wounds and scavenge
the pieces of God you hid in my upper berth on this
looming train?

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

A tragic loss for the poetry world and for those who loved him, Jozsef committed suicide in his early thirties. Since this month is being devoted to mental health awareness, perhaps his work will be rediscovered. I hope so.

Around the same time I devoured Jozsef’s poems, the poems of Marin Sorescu provided a delightful diversion. Despite living under unimaginably oppressive conditions, Marin apparently made the decision to write with wit and irony, rather than direct confrontation, which kept his work publishable in his home country and, eventually, here.

 

Sorescu’s Core
in honor of a Romanian poet

Marin, I’ve been staring
at the painting that you did
as a cover for translations
of your poems: a bowl
of fruit, well-suited to design
the colorful plump phrases
pared to sink your teeth
into the pulp of apples,
oranges, lemons, life-sliced
and spiced and eaten with
your hands
behind your back, elbows
akimbo, juice

dripping

      down my chin.

Mary Sayler, from A Gathering of Poems

 

Before publishing this post, I revisited poems by these seven poets, trying to find specific hotlinks to recommend to you. The many options make me plead with you to find and read their poems online!

Well, with five shelves at home devoted to poetry books, this post could go on and on! However, visual problems hinder my reading, writing, and (definitely!) arithmetic as numbers disappear and words or sentences look like they’ve been smashed by a compacter! Nevertheless, my love for poetry hasn’t lessened, so I hope to continue with this blog, albeit irregularly and with occasionally long gaps.

Thanks for bearing with me all these years!

May God bless you and your poetry adventures.

Mary Harwell Sayler ©2022

 

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Mary Oliver: my favorite poet

[NOTE: The following article originally appeared on Interlitq in my column Poets Who Make Us Better: Mary Oliver.]

When I began an arduous search of poetry journals, I read so many poems I didn’t connect with that I suspected I had been born in the wrong time with too many blessings to ever be a poet. So I did the only thing I knew to do: I stopped writing poems.

Then during a trip to New England I meandered into a quaint bookshop and saw the glossy green cover of White Pine, a poetry book by Mary Oliver. Confetti could have fallen! Or, more likely, rose petals, bird feathers, pine needles, and beach sand….

Her poems not only spoke to me as no one else’s had done, they called me to observe intently and search attentively for THE precise word. For instance, the opening poem “Work,” hung on these lines:

“All day I work
with the linen of words

and the pins of punctuation…”

We talk about words being “silken” – smooth, soft, sleek, and often shiny – the kind of things I had aimed for in writing poems, but no. In the very first poem of my very first introduction to Mary Oliver’s work, she tells us she’s looking for linen – a fabric that can be coarse or crumpled and in need of ironing. But, with strong fibers woven from the flax plant, linen is a natural material to work with in writing poems.

How unlike the synthetic poems I had been reading! How observant! And see  how precise the poem becomes in the line, “the pins of punctuation….” Isn’t that exactly what punctuation does?

What I’d often looked for, however, in the poetry I’d been reading were lines that carried insight to readers in a plum-delicious way. Consider, for example, Mary Oliver’s poem, “Yes! No!”

“How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted trout
lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the earth. I
think serenity is not something you just find in the world,
like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, like
small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste, but slowly,
looking at everything and calling out….”

Did you notice the poet’s skill in enticing us with lush, unexpected descriptions before injecting flat statements into the poem?

For another example, look at “I Looked Up,” and see how a ‘thick bird” with “a ruffle of fire trailing over the shoulders” prefaces these flat but startling statements:

“What misery to be afraid of death.
What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.”

The more I studied the poems in White Pine, the more the book hooked me until I wound up buying everything of Mary Oliver’s I could find. I also read and re-read A Poetry Handbook by this highly acclaimed poet, who had already won the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize. Then I discovered Blue Pastures with its poetically written essays on poets, poetry, and Oliver’s own writing life.

The wisdom, beauty, insight, exactitude, and down-to-earth practicalities of those books invite me to read them again, making new discoveries with each reading. In Owls and Other Fantasies, for example, the “Little Owl Who Lives in the Orchard” has a beak that “could open a bottle” while the eyes with “their soft lids” –

“go on reading something
just beyond your shoulder –
Blake, maybe,
or the Book of Revelation.”

One might say the same for the soft lids of Mary Oliver’s eyes as evidenced by “The Uses of Sorrow” in her book Thirst:

“Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.”

In both an experiment or a trial, evidence can confirm a claim or prove it, so it’s not surprising that one of Oliver’s books is called Evidence. The title poem includes a line that exhorts us (perhaps, like an Old Testament Prophet?) to “Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.”

Published by Beacon Press, Evidence contains the persuasive poem, “I Want to Write Something So Simply,” which shows the poet’s consistent aim in her work.

“I want to write something
so simply
about love
or about pain
that even
as you are reading
you feel it….”

until

“…you will realize –
that it was all the while
yourself arranging the words,
that it was all the time
words that you yourself,
out of your own heart
had been saying.”

That refreshing goal made her poetry exquisite yet accessible and unique and established Mary Oliver as a poet who makes us better as poets and people too.

Bio:

Mary Harwell Sayler recently collected almost all of the prayers in the Bible from many English translations and paraphrased them into everyday English for the Book of Bible Prayers. She also released the prayer book in the King James Version only as the Book of KJV Prayers then collected poems from her previously published work into A Gathering of Poems.

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Poets and poems to celebrate during National Poetry Month

Poets often ask each other about their favorite poets or poems, so here’s a list of personal Favs with hotlinks to poems for studying or just reading to enjoy. Feel free to add your favorites in the Comments section below.

Mary Oliver – The insightful and observant nature poetry of this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet drew me back into reading and writing poetry after years of writing almost everything except poems!

Charles Wright – Another Pulitzer Prize winner who weaves amazing metaphors and insight into exquisite free verse, this contemporary poet initially interested me because he was born in my native state of Tennessee, but his work appeals to a wide, global audience.

Donald Justice – This 20th Century Pulitzer poet had a home tie to Florida, where I’ve lived for years, but I especially enjoyed the insight into people and relationships often shown in his traditional poetry and free verse.

Pablo Neruda – Surrealist poetry, political poems, and odes of joy distinguish the Nobel Prize-winning poems of this 20th century poet, originally named Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, from Chile.

Billy Collins – A winner of numerous prestigious prizes, this former U.S. Poet Laureate has won a non-poetry-reading public with skillfully written humorous poetry, noted for asking such questions as why the farmer’s wife cut off mice-tails with a carving knife.

Maya Angelou – Loved by the general public, this former nightclub singer, actress, activist, and highly versatile poet has also written song lyrics, picture books for children, a Pulitzer-nominated screenplay, and a poem for President Clinton’s 1993 Inaugural.

Jorie Graham – The brilliant, insightful poems of this Pulitzer Prize-winning poet may require multiple readings if you approach her poems, as I first did, from a mind-brain that goes for comprehension, but if you read her poems aloud as an experience, you’ll feel the poetry and perhaps keep coming back for more.

Richard Wilbur – A veteran of WWII, this veteran poet has won more than one Pulitzer and pretty much every major award for poetry. More amazing, though, has been his ongoing dedication to writing traditional metered poetry during the ongoing reign of free verse.

Mary Ann Hoberman – Children’s Poet Laureate writes books for kids and lively poems with humor and bounce.



(c) 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler