My Three Favorite Poems From Three Books I've Read Recently

From Repair by C.K. Williams, "Archetypes," for it's lovely (as Williams does so well in this book) use of the image as the track, the path, the road to navigate around human relationships and a sense of understanding our experience


From Jab by Mark Halliday, "Head Wound," for proving a poem about poetry doesn't have to be stuffy or boring, but can talk its way to the core of a life and shine from within (first and last stanza below):

On the day that my life span matched my mother's life span,
on the day when I had come to live as long as my mother lived--
she died in 1975, of cancer, three days after her fifty-second birthday--
on the day when I had lived as many days as she got to live
(though for her there were hundreds and hundreds of days of
miserable pain, which has not at all been my fate)--
on that day
I went to the gym to play basketball with some friends
.....................
Driving to the Emergency Rom I had seven thoughts:
1. It's a reminder.
2. It's a warning.
3. Let's not get carried away.
4. No wonder it is necessary and has always been necessary
to read poems and write the, to read novels and write them,
because the world is this enormous haunted cavern or enchanted gymnasium
filled, too filled with symbolic meanings ready at any moment
to spring forth like goblins and make anything significant.
5. I'm lucky, she wasn't lucky;
she wasn't lucky, I'm lucky, it doesn't mean
ANYTHING--
6. But even if it doesn't, I can still say
her bad luck was bad;
7. And if that's true, doesn't it follow
that my good luck is good?

From The New Year of Yellow by Matthew Lippman, "And Everywhere It's Florida," where Lippmann makes you listen, an odd charm he has, and you're not concerned with truth/falsity, but with the poem, that moment where you're finally listening:

What I did, I lied.
I lied about the Cremora Food Truck hijacked,
brought to Boston, blown up,
just to get all that white powder up in the air,
just to get all the kids to listen;

I lied about the money and the hungry zookeeper
who killed two giraffes with a bullhorn then wheeled out the Hibachi.

I lied about living rooms on fire
and dead cowboys on my lawn
who rode clean out of thin air
before I shot 'em with my six shooter,
cried Geronimo,
broke down in hives
and got lost in the Hollywood tumbleweed.
All my life it's been helicopter blades in my spine;
all my life I've lied.

MATTHEW LIPPMAN

Yesterday, I'm eating this awesome Panera sandwich on like Rye bread with turkey and some fancy cheese and EVEN lettuce at the final Writing Center staff meeting. Todd comes in to swipe a sandwich (ITS OKAY HE IS MARRIED TO MY BOSS) and plops this book in front of me, all confident I'll like it.

HE WAS RIGHT. The New Year of Yellow by Matthew Lippman was a fun, nice, cool book. I gobbled it up in a day. HAR HAR HAR GOBBLE.

Lippman was one of those names that I've heard thrown in the poetry world, but I didn't know what was up with him. Here is what is up with Michael Lippman in three sentences: He rocks with the "here is what I'm doing" stuff, kind of like O'Hara, but not like this dude is totally being an O'Hara fanboy/ripper/chump. Rather, Lippman gives me that feeling that he likes O'Hara lots lots lots, but definitely Hoagland and Young and probably like Milosz or someone else foreign. Yeah, he whips up some cool meshy influenced poems that have a political bite to them on top the personal (WE ARE ALL A MESSYMESH OF INFLUENCES I THINK) and does it well because I like to read these poems as I'm doing my day to day stuff too.

Some of my favorites:
And Everywhere It's Florida
Blonde and All
Everyone Wants A Monkey
Insurrection
Excellent Still
I Suppose The Sadness of Things

ACTUALLY AND EVERYWHERE IT'S FLORIDA IS AT DIAGRAM READ IT READ IT PAL

YEAH YEAH QUICK POST ABOUT A GOOD BOOK QUICK READ NICE COMFORTING FINALS WEEK POEMS