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Poet's Notebook
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Peter Meinke's Poet's Notebook, Thanksgiving edition
Posted by Peter Meinke on Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 7:17 PM
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run . . .
Our children, with whom this year we can only gather post-Thanksgiving, are scattered all over the world, but we’ve been pleased to learn that Thanksgiving is celebrated
In Hanoi, where one of our sons works for USAID, they celebrate Têt-Trung-Thu, or Mid-Autumn Festival, which, instead of pumpkin pie, features mooncakes — square pastries stuffed with lotus seed paste. Another son is in Beijing, with similar festivities, except the mooncakes tend to be round. In America, of course, the people tend to be round, especially after Thanksgiving.
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Poet's Notebook: The War to End All Wars — didn’t.
Posted by Peter Meinke on Tue, Nov 9, 2010 at 4:30 PM
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?… Oh, to whom can we turn for help?
Not angels, not humans…
On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918, the horrific slaughter of World War I came to a stop, 92 years ago today. We like that symmetry: it’s a kind of poetry.
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Poet's Notebook: A good war novel reveals more than just the horrors of battle
Posted by Peter Meinke on Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 4:21 PM
Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son Achilleus
and its devastation, which put pains thousandfold upon the Achaians,
hurled in their multitudes to the house of Hades strong souls
of heroes, but gave their bodies to be the delicate feasting
of dogs…
So begins The Iliad, by the blind poet Homer (c. 850 B.C.), and so, more or less, begins Western literature, with the story of the Greek and Trojan war. For centuries, readers have found this blood-soaked epic mesmerizing, even somehow contemporary, in its appeal. The bravery of Hector, the cunning of Odysseus (Ulysses in Latin), the beauty of Helen, the strength of Achilles (except for his heel!), the sleaziness of Pandaros, the wisdom of Nestor: for centuries, these, and more, characters from Homer’s epic have inspired readers, writers and artists (not to mention hucksters: the Honda Odyssey or “Use Ajax, the foaming cleanser…”
This week I thought of The Iliad while reading Matterhorn, by Karl Marlantes (right), perhaps the best American war novel since The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer’s graphic account about the Pacific campaign in World War II.
Matterhorn — a cross between Mailer’s book and The Bridge Over the River Kwai — tells the story of a Marine platoon during the Vietnam War, trying valiantly and senselessly to take, hold and retake a useless hill, Matterhorn. Like Mailer, Marlantes wrote from experience: Mailer fought in the Philippines, and Marlantes was a much-decorated Marine — including two Purple Hearts — in the Vietnam struggle. Unlike Mailer, who’d already written a play called The Naked and the Dead and volunteered to fight in the South Pacific in order to write about it, Marlantes, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, took 30 years to finish his gripping saga (Mailer wrote his in two years, in Paris). Both, at 600+ pages, are serious tomes.
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Poet's Notebook: Crossovers still happen, but the gap between the parties is widening
Posted by Peter Meinke on Tue, Oct 5, 2010 at 1:13 PM
Stares from every human face
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Many of us, in mild debates that pop up naturally, are sometimes called “yellow dog” Democrats, which implies that we’ll always push that Democratic button straight down the line, the whole ticket, even if there’s only a mangy cur listed there. I used to object to this term, partially because of its history — it began around 1900 as an endearing nickname for pro-slavery Southern Democrats who hated the Republican party of Abraham Lincoln for prosecuting the Civil War (and generally pronounced “yaller dog,” which gives you an idea of the education level).
But in the last 10 years, I find myself barking more and more, not to mention foaming at the mouth. Still, as PolitiFact might say, even today this “yellow dog” claim would register as “Barely True.” Kendrick Meek or Charlie Crist? Hmm…
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Poet's Notebook: A toast to my uncle, the prototypical Irishman
Posted by Peter Meinke on Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:59 AM
Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid…
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!
—William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
On November 4th, 1992, the eve of Bill Clinton’s victory over George H. W. Bush, Jeanne and I stood shivering in a graveyard outside of Sligo,
Ireland, reading those last three lines, carved on William Butler Yeats’s tombstone. It was snowing lightly. The sharp limestone cliff of Ben Bulben rose behind the old church. We were the only ones there. This wasn’t a regular stop; we had to ask the bus driver to drop us off. Like Yeats’s poems, Drumcliff churchyard is starkly beautiful. I said, “Good place for a poet” — though I also thought, “Maybe, to the dead, one place is as good as another.” And then we left and hiked a half-mile down the road to the nearest pub. After a few proper libations to the great Irish bard, we went out into the cold and flagged down the first bus to town.
The next morning the small Sligo newspaper trumpeted: IRISH VOTE PUSHES CLINTON TO VICTORY! Clinton, whose greatest accomplishment probably was his work on the truce with the IRA, liked to boast of his ancestry from Ireland’s Ulster County. We were happy and proud, too: we were Americans; we were Democrats; and my mother was Kathleen McDonald. (And Jeanne has Welsh in her background: close enough!)
I was named after my grandfather, James McDonald, from County Louth, the “wee county” (my full name is James Peter Meinke); he was a musically talented postman — “mail carrier” in those days — who was unhappy in America, feeling his talents unrecognized and wasted. He speeded up the wasting by drinking heavily and dying at 55.
My uncle Thomas McDonald, my mother’s younger brother, was a charmer, a drinker, a gambler, a wit and a singer: in short, the prototypical Irishman. Lying on the top of the stairs in our narrow Flatbush rowhouse, my sisters and I used to listen to him sing and tell jokes, which were often bawdy (and the reason we were banished upstairs). Although far more extroverted than I, he must have influenced my early fascination with poetry — it seemed both fun and a little dangerous. At parties, after a few drinks, Uncle Tom could jump on a table and make up a birthday poem on the spot — ahead of his time, prefiguring slam and rap poetry, with its ribaldry and rhyme.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Commentative poetry of the times
Posted by Eric Stewart on Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 8:59 AM
The zeitgeist is a German world for "the spirit of the times; the general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time". Here are some poems that ring true for the current times by American poet Louis Daniel Brodsky.
Dubai World
Dubai World,
Fronted by the oil-inebriated United Arab Emirates,
A confederation of trickle-down-economics sheik-down artists,
Who put all their Western Easter eggs in leaky baskets:
A ski "mountain" moved into an indoor resort,
A beach cooled by under-the-sand, refrigerated pipe work,
Golf courses drenched, hourly, with desalinated ocean water,
Man-made islands kneaded into a vast palm-leaf array
And a map of Earth's landmasses --
A surreal Xanadu out-Las Vegasing Las Vegas,
A dizzying Disney World Shangri-la of mother's milk and money,
A Bahamian Paradise Island Atlantis resurrected from silica . . .
Dubious World,
Drowning in an oasis of debt, hoping to cross the Red-Ink Sea
Before the parted waters close, squeeze it dry.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Skipper's: a poem (audio)
Posted by T.R. Robbins on Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 10:48 PM
I first really noticed her
when she was waddling out of the
bathroom door - either because her
hip was plastic or her tolerance
was low.
has been here about 25 years.
She's probably lived 3 times that long.
And this place was built
piece by piece,
showing more staples than nails,
more tin roof than thatch -
at least as of late.
The antique scale is precise,
the same as the nurse said
yesterday but without the broken
stoplight and the working
neon yellow beacon
telling me Corona lives here
by way of the patron's rent money.
The oak tree dome is now filling
in the gaps of winter, and
the government just told me I have
one more hour of daylight to
to spend.
This place makes me happy.
Reminiscent of the smiles
she puts on her grandkids faces
when they simply think of
the candy dish that permanently
lives on her coffee table and
seems to never spend its savings.
If the grandkids only knew how
hard the candy had to work
to pay for the glass house,
they'd think twice before they
threw their favorite rock
at the solipsist that always
ducks.
It's a small price to pay
for happiness - ducking once in a while.
If it was built in a day,
maybe the refuge would be enough to
stop the rocks and the occasional
dodging dance.
But it never is.
Just ask your grandmother.
Monday, June 29, 2009
God complex: a poem (audio)
Posted by T.R. Robbins on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:02 PM
I can see the four glass walls
because they're dirty.
Filthy really, and in need of a razor blade
or a molten purification process.
But I like the dirty glass.
The dirt makes it real
and muddies the view of the miniature
naked people staring at me
from the inside,
oblivious to their recent
trip through the Wonkavision machine.
When the smog clears
you may get a glimpse of Demi Moore
in the corner of the world.
She still thinks the world is round.
Ah, that thought will fade away after
generations of stories pass
the time and the truth
into myth and religion.
Call it a God complex,
but I don't have as many pets
as my neighbors.
Poet's Notebook: Let's give everyone a gun
Posted by Peter Meinke on Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 4:35 PM
Oddly enough, Americans were rocked and shocked by three recent shootings — at the military recruitment center in Little Rock, the abortion clinic in Wichita and the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I write "oddly" because these are little red droplets in the bucket of American society. We've lost our way in some violent wilderness, where we can't see the forest for the trees.
Everyone knows that over 3,000 civilians were killed on 9/11, and over 4,000 soldiers killed in the Iraq war — but how many know that America regularly has over 16,000 murders per year, often over 20,000? Among so-called civilized countries, we're the world champions.
This isn't new news, and it's clear that the suggested solutions aren't going to happen. We're simply not going to limit our ability to get hold of any kind of weapon: that seems to be unAmerican.
So here's my idea. As all the wisest self-help gurus advise, it's healthiest to go with the flow (a rather literal flow, in this case). Since we can't beat the NRA or the gun-suppliers, we should do the only sensible thing, and join them.
My proposal is to arm every man, woman and child in the United States.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
The Meinkes in the Big Apple: St. Pete's poet laureate cuts loose
Posted by Peter Meinke on Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 11:54 AM
Last month, while we were visiting New York City, a proclamation was read in St. Petersburg Town Hall appointing me the city’s first poet laureate. Our quiet town has become “a city of writers,” the proclamation said, and oddly enough this no longer sounds humorous. Governments in general prefer their writers dead, so the times they are a-changing. Tampa has had a fine poet laureate, James Tokley, since 1996, and it’s time St. Pete caught up.
When Jeanne and I moved to St. Petersburg in 1966 — to start the Writing Workshop at Florida Presbyterian, now Eckerd, College — the only writer from here I was aware of was Jack Kerouac, drinking himself to a lonely death in a plain house on 10th Avenue North; and we’d drive by it once in a while as an act of homage. We had some friends in common with the old beatnik — notably the writer Richard Hill, now also gone — but never met. Back then, the city wasn’t very fond of him (and still isn’t, apparently).
Our NY revels, and past vacation disasters, after the break.
