Category Archives: Poems

Weekend read: Maryann Corbett, ‘A Valediction: of Maintenance Work’

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Time was, we spent our muscle and our nous
propping an aging house
against the pummeling of its hundred years.
Clean paint, neat gardens, upkeep rarely in arrears,
sober as Donne. Yet now each year afresh
burdens us with new failings of the flesh:

Legs that once mounted ladders without qualm
tremble. Nor are we calm
confronting pipework; torsos will not shrink,
backs bend, or shoulders fold to grope below a sink.
Hands shake; eyeballs glaze over. What appalls
is that our bodies buckle like our walls:

plaque in arteries, soot in chimney stacks,
stubborn and troublous cracks
in teeth, in plaster. House! Ought we to call
ourselves—and you—new poster children for the Fall,
for that hard doctrine grumbling down the ages
that Sin’s to blame, with Death and Rot its wages?

Entropy as theology—would Donne
jape at it? Wink and pun
as in his randy youth? Or solemnly
robed in his winding sheet, sing Mutability,
spinning into the praise of God in Art
the fact that all things earthly fall apart?

Or pull from air some bit of modern science,
yoking (even by violence)
thermodynamics, shortened telomeres,
transplants, genetics, sex, the music of the spheres?
Strange physics and wild metaphors—all grand,
but Rot and Death, plain woes we understand,

are better fought with checkbooks than with verse.
We’ll sit, these days. We’ll nurse
our beers, while able bodies stir their dust.
A distant siren whines—we sigh; it whines for us.
Let plumbers, painters, carpenters begin
this season’s round of battling Death and Sin.

*****

Maryann Corbett writes: “Last summer, Clarence Caddell was just beginning work on a new magazine, The Borough, and was planning a second issue while the first came together. He had in mind an issue centered on Donne, and he commissioned me to contribute a poem. I’d read the wonderful biography Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell not many months before, so a lot of the life was fresh in my mind–but it was also the season of endless repair that is the eternal truth of owning a house that’s 113 years old.  It wasn’t hard to pull together a poem about the woes of home ownership with tidbits that “everyone knows” about Donne–his worldly-to-holy conversion, the familiar line about his yoked-by-violence metaphors–under an allusive title, and in a stanza form a bit like one of his. (Alas, this blog can’t show you the indents that would best imitate Donne’s way of laying out a poem. You’ll have to imagine all the trimeter second lines indented and the hexameter fourth lines hanging out farther left.) In the end, Clarence had to use the poem to fill out his first issue, so it sat alone, unassisted by an issue theme.”

Maryann Corbett earned a doctorate in English from the University of Minnesota in 1981 and expected to be teaching Beowulf and Chaucer and the history of the English language. Instead, she spent almost thirty-five years working for the Office of the Revisor of Statutes of the Minnesota Legislature, helping attorneys to write in plain English and coordinating the creation of finding aids for the law. She returned to writing poetry after thirty years away from the craft in 2005 and is now the author of two chapbooks and six full-length collections, most recently The O in the Air (Franciscan U. Press, 2023). Her work has won the Willis Barnstone Translation Prize and the Richard Wilbur Award, has appeared in many journals on both sides of the Atlantic, and is included in anthologies like Measure for Measure: An Anthology of Poetic Meters and The Best American Poetry.


Photo: “House Repairs” by JessNityaJess is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Susan McLean, ‘Home Economics’

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Like other teenage girls in ‘65,
I learned to knit, embroider, and crochet,
so if I’m teleported back in time
a century or two, I’ll do okay.

I learned the way to wrap a package neatly,
to tie a range of plain and froufrou bows,
to minimize my body flaws discreetly,
using the cut and pattern of my clothes.

I also learned to iron, hem, and baste,
to sew on zippers, trim, and appliqué,
to choose a hairdo that would suit my face—
and nothing that I ever use today.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “In the mid-Sixties, the times were changing, but the education of teenage girls was not. In junior high school home economics classes, which girls were required to take, the girls were trained in sewing and cooking skills as preparation for their future roles as wives and mothers. The ideas that men might need to know any of those skills or that women might have full-time careers were not considered. In addition to teaching girls domestic skills, the classes served to reinforce the gender roles and expectations of the time (which had not changed significantly from those of the previous few centuries).

“I slightly overstate my case when I say that I never use anything now that I learned in the two years of sewing classes I took. I still wrap a package and sew on a button occasionally, but I had learned both of those skills well before I took the classes. And even when I was taking the classes, I was already determined to have a career of my own. I petitioned successfully to be allowed to skip the cooking classes so that I could take art classes in their place (though, ironically or not, I am now an enthusiastic home cook). I didn’t mind learning various sewing skills, which had an artistic side, but I had no interest in spending a lot of time using them afterwards, and the view of my options that the classes conveyed was quite dispiriting. No one foresaw how radically the roles of many women would be changing soon afterwards. But I am very glad that they changed.

“The rhymed quatrains that the poem is written in are a standard poetic form, though the mix of slant rhymes with true rhymes suggests an underlying dissonance that ties in with the poem’s themes. The poem originally appeared in the online journal Umbrella and was later published in my second poetry book, The Whetstone Misses the Knife.”

Susan McLean has two books of poetry, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Measure, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.
https://www.pw.org/content/susan_mclean

Photo: “Home Economics Class at Elgin Court School, St. Thomas, 1961” by Elgin County Archives is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

RHL, ‘Boy With Scab’

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The boy he’s always been still takes delight
In testing scabs on elbows, knees,
To see if fingernails can assert their right
To lift with satisfying ease
The lid from off the mystery healing box
And see the flesh beneath the skin
Where the wise body-mind slowly unlocks
Corpuscles and white pus within.
The hint of pain, like some itch that you scratch,
Is fun alongside look-and-see.
What does the boy do with that useless patch,
The scab? Easy: autophagy.

*****

Curiosity is a useful aspect of intelligence. This poem first published in Lighten Up Online (aka LUPO). Thanks, Jerome Betts!

Photo: “War Stories” by Noël Zia Lee is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Poems on poems: Ogden Nash, ‘The Collector’

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I met a traveler from an antique show,
His pockets empty, but his eyes aglow.
Upon his back, and now his very own,
He bore two vast and trunkless legs of stone.
Amid the torrent of collector’s jargon
I gathered he had found himself a bargain,
A permanent conversation piece post-prandial,
Certified genuine early Ozymandial
And when I asked him how he could be sure,
He showed me P. B. Shelley’s signature.

*****

Ogden Nash‘s teasing take on Shelley’s Ozymandias is collected in ‘The Old Dog Barks Backwards’.

Photo: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone” by skittledog is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Anon, ‘I Eat My Peas With Honey’

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I eat my peas with honey;
I’ve done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.

*****

The staying power of well-turned nonsense rhymes is testament to the value of rhythm and rhyme for keeping something intact, perfectly remembered. The poem’s joke is well done, with a good punchline; but the word-for-word memorability comes from the magic of verse.

The Poetry Foundation recognises this poem as having been recited in the American comedy/quiz show ‘It Pays to Be Ignorant‘ on 2nd February 1944 (or more likely 7th February 1944), you can hear Harry McNaughton read it here, and my guess is that he (or another of the show’s writers) was the author. Apparently some people have thought it was written by Shel Silverstein (1930-1999), but this is denied by his Estate and its archivists. Others in the US have stated it is by Ogden Nash. In the UK it has been labeled as Spike Milligan’s. It is an object lesson in optimistic (i.e. false) attribution. But even in Arnold Silcock’s collection ‘Verse and Worse’ (Faber & Faber, 1952) it is only credited to Anonymous… whose birth was a long time ago, and whose death is not expected any time soon.

Photo: “I eat peas with honey – Day 101 of Project 365” by purplemattfish is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Samuel Wilberforce, ‘If I Were a Cassowary’

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If I were a cassowary
On the plains of Timbuctoo
I would eat a missionary,
Cassock, bands, and hymn-book too.

*****

Yes, cassowaries are from Australia and New Guinea, and Timbuktu is in Africa… but so what? The rhymes are too good to ignore. ‘Bands’, btw, refers to the pseudo-necktie thingies that priest-types and lawyer-types affect in some countries – little cloth flaps, plural because you wear two of them.

The probable author is Bishop Samuel “Soapy Sam” Wilberforce, best known nowadays for debating  Thomas Henry Huxley on evolution in 1860. Huxley (Aldous Huxley’s grandfather) was commonly referred to as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’. Wilberforce is remembered for his question as to whether it was through his grandmother or his grandfather that Huxley considered himself descended from a monkey. Huxley is said to have replied that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth.  Apparently everyone enjoyed the debate, and they all went off happily to dinner together afterwards.

Cassowaries are more formidable than either Wilberforce or Huxley. Standing over six feet tall, capable of running at 30 mph (and good swimmers in rivers and sea), and able to leap and strike chest-high with razor-sharp 5-inch talons, they are omnivores not to be confronted. Yes, they might well eat a missionary. Also, the cassowary’s bands are more impressive.

Photo: “Cassowary at the Budapest zoo” by brenkee is marked with CC0 1.0.

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Sunny Afternoon’

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Book discarded, like excess baggage shed
by someone who has rapidly pushed on
into uncharted regions far ahead,
he sleeps in an old deck chair on the lawn.
Gulls circle, skaters on an ice-blue lake,
while he dreams on, oblivious, his face
unshaded by a hat which, when awake,
he wears with equanimity and grace.
What does he dream? Is the unreal more real
than those pale gulls that spiral high above?
In sleep, has youth returned? No longer frail,
does he relive time when impatient love
was everything and all his heart desired,
before life tricked him, left him old and tired?

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I suppose Sunny Afternoon reflects my own station in life, that is, drifting steadily towards the end, with the usual collection of regrets that most of us have.”

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet (and humorist) currently living in Guernsey, a small island midway between Britain and France. His work has appeared in various magazines, most recently Snakeskin, Bewildering Stories, Lighten Up Online, the Taj Mahal Review and the Potcake Chapbook ‘Lost Love’, and has been broadcast on BBC radio. He has performed at several literary festivals and his latest collection of verse, Stone Witness, features the titular poem commissioned by the BBC for National Poetry Day. He writes in various genres and can be found at www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/richard.fleming.92102564/

Photo: posted by Richard Fleming

Sonnet: Eric McHenry, ‘Lives of the Poets’

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They rubbed two sticks together and made friction.
They made a fist but couldn’t make a hand.
Their dictionary wasn’t made of diction.
Their diction made them hard to understand.

Trying to make a poem, they made a list.
Trying to make the team, they made the choir.
They made up stories whose protagonist
would rub two sticks together and make fire.

Mistakes were made, and mixtapes to go with them.
They made a couch their bed and made their bed.
They tried to make a joke at the expense
of love and money. “Make me,” money said.
They made up stories but they made no sense.
They rubbed two cents together and made rhythm.

*****

Eric McHenry writes: “Strangely, I remember almost nothing about writing this poem, except that I was thinking about the etymology of ‘poet’ (‘maker’) and about the versatility of the verb ‘make’.”

‘Lives of the Poets’ was first published in Literary Matters.

Eric McHenry is a professor of English at Washburn University and a past poet laureate of Kansas. His books of poetry include Odd Evening, a finalist for the Poets’ Prize; Potscrubber Lullabies, which received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and Mommy Daddy Evan Sage, a collection of children’s poems illustrated by Nicholas Garland. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, with his wife and two children.
Eric McHenry – The Waywiser Press
Eric McHenry, Author at The American Scholar

Photo: “Master Sacha twirls the fire stick” by one thousand years is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Sonnet: RHL, ‘Communication Breakdown’

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I love you with that love floppy and large,
As one of us a man – the other, dog;
Involved, detached, our life’s a travelogue
Of countrysides seen from a rented barge,
“Travels With You” along some river’s marge,
Failing at interspecies dialogue
Till tries at talk are lost in night and fog,
Drifting with batteries we can’t recharge.

Yet there’s no option but to travel on,
Each varied day no different than before,
Wondering if we’ll find some magic door
Which, risking entry, gives communion;
And if, by talking, love would be enhanced,
Or if we’d then destroy all we have chanced.

*****

Sonnet originally published in Candelabrum in 2007.

Photo: “Accordion player” by eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Spenserian sonnet: Charles Martin, ‘On the Problem of Bears’

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Bears are frustrated by their lack of speech,
Their claws leave blackboards shrieking for repairs,
And that’s why bears are seldom asked to teach
And almost never get Distinguished Chairs
Unless they come across one unawares
Whose rich upholstery they quickly shred.
Some of them have been known to have affairs
With a man or woman lured into their bed—
This often ends up badly with one dead,
The other executed for the crime,
Or given a life sentence in a zoo.
Bears are familiar with existential dread,
Bears put their pants on one leg at a time:
The problems bears have are your problems too.

*****

Charles Martin writes: “The poem is written in a variation on the Spenserian Sonnet form, which I have been writing for several years now. In this case, I enjoy the contrast between the strictness of the form and the raucousness of its subject. As I recall, I began it on a morning walk, and I think finished it shortly after the walk ended. 

“The poem will next appear in The Khayyam Suite this spring, published by The Johns Hopkin University Press, which has published my last two collections of poetry, Signs & Wonders and Future Perfect, both of which are still in print. (Future Perfect has a sonnet sequence written in the Spenserian form.) Poems have recently been published in Literary Matters, The Hudson Review, Classical Outlook, and in Best American Poetry, 2024.”

Charles Martin is a poet, translator of poetry, and essayist. The Khayyam Suite is the fifth of his eight books of poetry to appear in the Fiction and Poetry Series of the Johns Hopkins University Press. His poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Literary Matters, The Hopkins Review and, in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Poetry, and War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing. He has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, an Ingram Merrill Grant, a Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine, and a Pushcart Prize. His residencies include the Djerassi Foundation and Ragdale, and he served as Poet in Residence for five years for the American Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. His translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Award from the Academy of American Poets, and he has also translated The Poems of Catullus and the Medea of Euripides. He is the author of the critical introduction to Catullus in the Hermes Book series of Yale University Press and of numerous essays on, and reviews of, classical and contemporary poetry.

Photo: from the Bantam/Seal cover of Marian Engle’s novel ‘Bear’, referenced in https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/why-the-classic-canadian-novel-bear-remains-controversial-and-relevant-1.5865107