David Anthony Sam's Blog, page 203

Buddhist Poetry Review will be publishing 3 of my poems

Buddhist Poetry Review will be publishing 3 of my poems in their May 2015 online edition.
http://ow.ly/MsiAe ‪#‎yam‬ ‪#‎dreamsofwolves‬

David Sam's Reviews > New and Selected Poems: Mary Oliver

New and Selected Poems: Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Sometimes the great bones of my life feel so heavy, and all the tricks my body knows— the opposable thumbs, the kneecaps, and the mind clicking and clicking— don’t seem enough to carry me through this world and I think: how I would like to have wings"

So writes Mary Oliver in one of the first poems of this collection---and throughout she exposes her confrontation with mortality and her and our earthbound nature.

Selected in reverse chronological order, the poems show the growth of the poet over three decades. He language is vivid and her poetic seeing often surprisingly exact:

"the black snake jellies forward"

"and the birds, in the endless waterfalls of the trees"

She loves life, loves nature, with the passion of one who knows mortality in the flight of an owl's hunger. Spend some time with this poet and the wonderful words she leaves behind for us to follow, like a trail through the forest.

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One of my favorite Dickinson poems

“Hope” is the thing with feathers - (314)BY EMILY DICKINSON
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -That perches in the soul -And sings the tune without the words -And never stops - at all -
And sweetest - in the Gale - is heard -And sore must be the storm -That could abash the little BirdThat kept so many warm -
I’ve heard it in the chillest land -And on the strangest Sea -Yet - never - in Extremity,It asked a crumb - of me.

A lovely collection

Lantern Puzzle by Ye Chun
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ye Chun paints her poetry in an English that refers both to her life and family history in China and also to the pictorial language of that land. She weaves the personal, the political, and the natural in a fabric that speaks quietly but profoundly. Nowhere do I read or hear a misstep, just the ebb and flow of the river of her experience.

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Journals recently publishing my poetry

In the last 12 months, the following journals have accepted my poetry for publication:

“This Weaving” Summerset Review, Summer 2014
“Eden” Literature Today, Fall 2014
“Bad Dreams” The Birds We Piled Loosely Fall 2014
“Betrayals” The Write Place at the Write Time Fall 2014
“Above Emile Creek” FLARE: The Flagler Review Fall 2014
 “Ex-voto” The Crucible December 2014
“Murder in the Garden” Literature Today, Winter 2014-15
“Fire, Food, Metal" Carbon Culture Review Feb. 2015
"The Diversity of Habitable Zones"  Carbon Culture Review Feb. 2015
“Flowing into the Adjacent Possible” The Scapegoat Review Spring 2015
"As Tart Cherries Are Still Sweet" The Scapegoat Review Fall 2015
"Geology of The Blue Ridge" The Scapegoat Review Fall 2015
“Stars, Drought, and Adam” On the Rusk Issue 7
“Harpies” Hound
“Treehouse Summer” From the Depths (Haunted Waters Press)
“The Difficulty of Morning” Heron Tree online and September 2015 print
“Remnant” American Tanka

I thank them all and encourage readers to seek them out.

A Fascinating Look at One Poet Reading Another

My Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Howe's short book is an illuminating take on one of my favorite poets, focusing in particular on a careful reading of "My Life Stood---a Loaded Gun." Howe does an excellent job of showing the poetic and other influences on Dickinson, especially the Brownings, Shakespeare (King Lear in particular), Fenimore Cooper, and Jonathan Edwards. Sometimes, Howe lets her own poetic rhetoric carry her away into near intelligibility, but I simply take that as her excitement and appreciation for what Dickinson was able to do. If you appreciate Dickinson, give this a read. If you are not sure, definitely read this work of one poet reading another.

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Still a Classic

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those novels I was supposed to read as a youth, but never got around to it. In this case, the consensus is right. Mockingbird Courageously looks at the Jim Crow South and the damage it did to white and black citizens alike. Told from the viewpoint of a precocious girl who has a strong sense of right and wrong, it is reminiscent of Hucklebery Finn in that Lee like Twain uses the innocence of a child to skewer an adult society built on racism and classism, and the adults who sustain it. The characters are alive and real, and the story is exciting even though I have seen the movie and knew what was coming. Now that I have read it once, I imagine Mockingbird will reward my rereading.

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Read and Savor

In the Next Galaxy by Ruth Stone
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The more I read the poetry of Ruth Stone, the more I regret her passing in 2011. She weaves the natural world, current events, the lives of other characters, and science into the web of telling her own life. With unassuming eloquence, she speaks in a diction that is both commonplace and vivid:

"the power of nothing to multiply.
Turning the hand over to become the palm,
for a moment it can shape itself into a cup of water."

In this passage and throughout, Stone seeks a deep acceptance of what is and what has been so that she may live in the now, despite the terrible loss built into our very existence:

"Then the absent tree when the play yard is paved with asphalt,
a blank space where the tree was, a space that the birds pass pver,
where the wind does not pause."

Or in describing her decades as a widow:

"in my thirty years of knowing you
cell by cell in my widow's shawl,
we have lived together longer
in the discontinuous films of my sleep
that we did in our warm parasitical bodies"

In all, she finds "unreasoning hope" in the flights of starlings, in the "language of the meanings within the meanings" contained in the growth of cabbage in her garden, in her dreams and memories. This is an adult book of poetry for those readers who have lived long enough not to be impressed with bathos or the false art of faithless language twisted into pretense. Read it. Savor it.

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Often brilliant, sometimes stuck in a new prison

Put Your Hands in by Chris Hosea
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This collection was difficult to rate with the simple star method because I found it sometimes brilliant, sometimes interesting enough, and sometimes just too cute or "experimental" for its own good. I chose 4 stars because when it is good, it demonstrates that there are still possibilities in the intentional destruction of grammar and language. a la Ashberry if the writer is skilled. And Hosea is skilled.

Told in many voices, often speaking in the same poem, even the same line, the poems do convey fractured stories and experiences. I found myself underlining lines and parts of lines for their eloquence, though Hosea may hate that word. This volume is for those willing to work at reading by not trying too hard to understand in a traditional prose sense, but simply bathe in the flow of words and let them rumble their meanings.

I did find many poems simply too fractured, pushing past the limits where little can pass between writer and reader, whatever meaning too hidden in the scramble. And there were a few that I just passed off as just an in your face game. Here is a line repeated in "Black Steel":

(thing) (thing) (thing) (thing)

Okay. Not a lot of craft there.

But pass by such exercises in the cool, and you do get gems in the mix:

"she ate night its gaps her dirt pie"

"a ruler to measure poems for a prison frock"

This last line probably is Hosea's negative aesthetic statement. He is fighting a battle long one against the Victorian strictures of verse forms and language. The most radical thing to do today is not to follow the new order established by Stein, Pound, Elliot, Ashberry etc., writers I certainly admire, but to find a new way to make the language of poetry whole again without betraying its soul. Hose finds this too confining and imprisoning.

Ironically, the "shock of the new" is now a new prison.

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A Poignant and Thoughtful Interview with Jane Hirshfield

In a poignant and thoughtful interview, one of my favorite contemporary poets, Jane Hirshfield, says some simply profound things about why we write and read poetry.

http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Interview-with-poet-Jane-Hirshfield-6128947.php

"I think art keeps its newness because it’s at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It’s more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance."

"The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry’s words as what they are: the full self’s most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day."