Alison McGhee's Blog, page 19

Poem of the Week, by Tony Hoagland

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Jet

- Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out

on the back porch, drinking jet fuel

with the boys, getting louder and louder

as the empty cans drop out of our paws

like booster rockets falling back to Earth

and we soar up into the summer stars.

Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead,

bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish

and old space suits with skeletons inside.

On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness,

and it is good, a way of letting life

out of the box, uncapping the bottle

to let the effervescence gush

through the narrow, usually constricted neck.

And now the crickets plug in their appliances

in unison, and then the fireflies flash

dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation

for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex

someone is telling in the dark, though

no one really hears. We gaze into the night

as if remembering the bright unbroken planet

we once came from,

to which we will never

be permitted to return.

We are amazed how hurt we are.

We would give anything for what we have.

–

​For more information on Tony Hoagland, please click here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/05/boo...​

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Shelley Whitaker

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The Fox Den

-  Shelley Whitaker

As a kid on Spring evenings

while junebugs hooked their legs

into every drop of water and lassos

of grey moths sliced the air,

I would sit mid-driveway

waiting for a family of fox pups

to emerge from their hole in the earth

beside our house. Every May evening

they were born from red straw beds

of those woods; sharp-eyed, black-chinned

creatures burning behind the trees

like apparitions of the sunset.

I would always rise too quickly,

plastic zippers buzzing, shoelace

slapping concrete, scaring them

underground again. It knocked

the heart out of me to send something

back into blackness, to think a necklace

of sun-hungry dogs was snaking its way

back towards the center of the world,

all because I shuddered, all because

I thought I heard the wind call

my name, and rushed to meet it.

–

For more information on Shelley Whitaker, please click here: http://www.versedaily.org/2014/aboutshelleywhitaker.shtml

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Wild yeast

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I’ve baked a fair amount of bread in my life, but not much in recent years. That’s what happens when you live within a mile or two of several great bakeries. Each sells a kind of bread I can only find there.

Turtle Bread for olive bread and a loaf of multigrain that tastes delicious instead of like twigs. Rustica for levain. Honey & Rye for rye. Great Harvest for whole wheat. Patisserie 46 for croissants. And Bill’s Imported Foods for the baked-daily pocket bread, for which you need to get there before noon because it sells out fast.

Out of curiosity, though, I decided to try a no-knead bread recipe. It seemed odd to me that you could even make yeast bread without kneading it. Isn’t kneading the whole point? Wouldn’t the bread fail to rise if you didn’t knead it? Skepticism. But I gave it a whirl.

What you do is mix flour and water and salt and a tiny, tiny bit of instant yeast in a bowl. Then you put it on your counter and do nothing. It sits there for a long time, like 12-20 hours. Then you dump it into a heavy, preheated pot with a lid, and you bake it in a very hot, preheated oven.

(Note: Given the simplicity of this recipe you would think I could follow it exactly. But no. I added more salt because I hate not-salty-enough bread. I didn’t have a Dutch oven or any heavy-enough pot with a lid, so I baked it in an enamel bowl half the recommended size and stuck a cookie sheet over the top. And I didn’t have instant yeast so I used active dry.)

It was the best bread I’ve ever made. One of the best breads I’ve ever had, period. So tasty that my youthful companion and I gobbled up the entire loaf in less than a day, straight out of the oven and slathered with butter, toasted and slathered with butter, broken up and tossed into bowls of soup, and I made another loaf the next day and another a few days after that.

Why this bread is so good is something I’ve been thinking about for days. It’s as basic as it gets: unbleached white flour, water, salt, yeast. But it’s dense and heavy, unlike most yeast bread that rises so high and light. Chewy. Delicious. Primitive. Interesting.

That’s the word that keeps coming to me: interesting.

The bread requires no human work beyond the few seconds that it takes to mix the ingredients in a bowl. But the yeast is working. For twenty hours, give or take a few in either direction, the yeast is working.

It’s working hard, too. This yeast is deprived. You use a tiny fraction of what you would use in regular, kneaded bread. That’s the first deprivation. You mix it into cold water instead of warm. More deprivation. There’s no sugar in that cold water, not even half a teaspoon, to help the yeast proof. There’s no kneading.

The yeast begins its life in difficult circumstances. Everything that it must do, it must do on its own.

The yeast works in the dark, metabolizing simple sugars and excreting carbon dioxide and alcohol and growing and growing and growing. If you peek at it during those long hours you won’t notice anything until near the end, when suddenly you realize that the ordinary lump of dough in the bowl has grown big and alive-looking. The shiny surface is pocked with tiny holes.

It’s at that point that you pick the whole thing up with both hands –it will come up all of a piece, like a sleeping animal– and put it in a hot pot and from there into the hot oven.

The taste of this bread is the result of deprivation and the hard work that comes in the wake of deprivation. And there’s a wildness in it that might also be the result of the wild yeast that floats into the dough from the air during all those long hours on the counter.

The difference between this no-knead, many-houred bread is the difference between the taste of a “baby” carrot pulled out of a watery plastic bag and the taste of a carrot pulled by its feathery green top out of the backyard.

It’s the difference between a page of writing scribbled out ten minutes before class and a poem that’s been gathering force for years on end, written and rewritten and rewritten again.

Now I’m thinking of long ago, when I used to teach Chinese at a big public high school, and the difference between, say, a Hmong student who had grown up in a Thai refugee camp, a student unsure of the year or day on which he had been born but sure of why he wanted an education, and a born-and-bred American student who had been given a new car as a 16th birthday gift.

I didn’t love one more than the other. I still don’t. But I recognize the difference.

Poem of the Week, by Gregory Djanikian

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Something Else

- Gregory Djanikian

There’s the lush grass again,

the white pines green and mysterious.

And the barn, too, in the distance,

fading red, the color of longing.

The afternoon light is gilding the hillside,

the clouds are moving together,

huge, incipient thoughts,

and you’re swooning with desire

wanting the beautiful to lie down with you,

gold-leaf your fingertips and tongue,

green you with fragrance

though you don’t know exactly

what you’re after, whether it’s beauty itself

or whatever lives inside it,

elusive, entire,

peripheral to your wanting—

shadow of wings

you catch obliquely

along the woods’ edge,

river that you hear

without listening.

* * *

For more information on Gregory Djanikian, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/g...

My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison...

Poem of the Week, by Sharon Olds

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Station

- Sharon Olds

Coming in off the dock after writing,

I approached the house,

and saw your long grandee face

in the light of a lamp with a parchment shade

the color of flame.

An elegant hand on your beard. Your tapered

eyes found me on the lawn. You looked

as the lord looks down from a narrow window

and you are descended from lords. Calmly, with no

hint of shyness you examined me,

the wife who runs out on the dock to write

as soon as one child is in bed,

leaving the other to you.

Your long

mouth, flexible as an archer’s bow,

did not curve. We spent a long moment

in the truth of our situation, the poems

heavy as poached game hanging from my hands.

–

For more information on Sharon Olds, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/s...

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My Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Alison...

Poem of the Week, by Pablo Neruda

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Love Sonnet LXXXIX

- Pablo Neruda

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:

I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands

to pass their freshness over me once more:

I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.

I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you

to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,

to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live

and you whom I love and sang above everything else

to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can teach everything my love directs

you to,

so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,

so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

–

For more information on Pablo Neruda, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/pablo-neruda

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My blog: alisonmcghee.com/blog

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Galway Kinnell

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St. Francis and the Sow

- Galway Kinnell

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing its loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;

as St. Francis

put his hand on the creased forehead

of the sow, and told her in words and in touch

blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow

began remembering all down her thick length,

from the earthen snout all the way

through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of

the tail,

from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine

down through the great broken heart

to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering

from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking

and blowing beneath them:

the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

–

For more information on Galway Kinnell, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/galway-kinnell

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My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Library appearances this coming week!

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Greetings, those of you living in the tropics of southeastern Minnesota! I’ll be speaking at four different libraries this week.

Tuesday, Jan. 21, 3:30 p.m., Blooming Prairie Public Library and 7 pm, Northfield Public Library.

Wednesday, Jan. 22, evening, Plainview Public Library.

And Thursday, Jan. 23, 6:30 p.m., Spring Grove Public Library.

Fear not the coming polar vortex, my friends. Slog on out – I’d love to see you there.

Poem of the Week, by Marianne Kunkel

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Homeschooled

- Marianne Kunkel

The Nazis? Learned of them in comic books.

Titanic? Heard of it when I mistook

the film for a rom-com on a cruise ship—

glued to my friend’s TV as she skinny-dipped

with a lawn boy, I wondered what the hell

else my parents wouldn’t tell. Six-by-eight cells,

she later said, scrunching her dripping hair,

inside a jail called Gitmo. Then upstairs

in her dad’s office, she skimmed her fingernail

across a world map: Hiroshima, Trail

of Tears, Darfur. No password locking it,

a laptop on the desk showed us portraits

of Katrina—backpacked men wading in streets,

told too late of disaster. Dead last, like me.

–

For more information on Marianne Kunkel, please click here: http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/?q=blog/around-office-marianne-kunkel

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts

Poem of the Week, by Joshua Mehigan

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How Strange, How Sweet

- Joshua Mehigan

This was a butcher. This, a Chinese laundry.

This was a Schrafft’s with 10-cent custard ice creams.

Off toward the park, that was the new St. Saviour.

Then, for five blocks, not much but chain-link fences.

These foolish things, here today, gone today,

yesterday, forty years ago, tomorrow.

Deloreses and Normas not quite gone,

with slippers on, and heads like white carnations,

little, and brittle, and mum, why did the fine

September weather call you out today?

To dangerously bend and touch a cat.

To lean beside your final door and smile.

To go a block and get a thing you need.

What are you hiding, ladies? What do you know?

Micks were from here to there. Down there, the Mob.

And, way down there, the mob the bill let in.

Far west were Puerto Ricans. Farther west,

in Newark, Maplewood, or Pennsylvania,

one canceled choice away, why, there’s nostalgia,

lipstick, and curls, and gum, and pearls on Sunday.

So here’s a platinum arc from someone’s neck chain,

bass through a tinted window, loudest laughter,

the colored fellow with the amber eyes

who doesn’t need to stand just where he is.

Here sits the son of 1941,

a pendulous pink arm across a chair back;

his sister, she of 1943,

her hair the shade of an orangutan.

Food stamps and welfare, Medicaid and Medicare.

Kilroy was here. Here was where to get out of.

Last come the new inevitable whites.

See how the gracious evening sunshine lights

their balconied high-rise’s apricot

contemporary stucco-style finish.

Smell the pink-orange powder as some punk

sandblasts Uneeda Biscuit off the wall.

Flinch at the miter saw and nail gun,

at three-inch nails that yelp as men dismantle

a rooftop pigeon loft. Those special birds

will not fly home to the implicit neighbor,

or fall like tiny Esther Williamses

in glad succession from a wire, to climb

and circle in the white December sky.

Far up, from blocks away, the pale birds seemed,

when they all turned at once, to disappear.

Across the street, the normal pigeons eat.

–

For more information on Joshua Mehigan, please click here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/joshua-mehigan

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Alison-McGhee/119862491361265?ref=ts