happy blue year!

January 16, 2018January 19, 2018 ~ jama ~ 58 Comments

“There’s a certain time of day after sunset when people naturally seem to feel the urge to gather by a fire or a stove or a hibachi or another common source of heat and food, and hunker down together to eat and drink. Call it the blue hour.” ~ Kate Christensen

🎵 Blue on blue, heartache on heartache . . . 🎶

Remember that song? It comes to mind whenever I think about 2017 . . .

But now it’s 2018 — Happy New Year, Friends!

We’ve turned the page, so it’s time to shift our thinking.

BLUE IS GOOD!

In fact, it’s so good, I chose to make THINK BLUE my motto for 2018. 🙂

Last year my One Little Word was TRUTH. Poor Truth was tested, dragged through the mud, disguised, distorted, ignored, disregarded. Is that any way to treat one of the bedrocks of a civilized society? I think not.

I will always champion Truth, because no matter what you do to her, she prevails. She will always find a way to make herself known.

Since Truth is having an especially tough time right now, I wanted to support her with Two Little Words. I chose THINK BLUE after reading this poem:

HIS FAVORITE BLUE CUP
by Stephen Dobyns

Over the years — and Heart has had many years —
numerous objects have slipped from his possession,
some were lost, some fell apart, some got stolen.
That cowboy doll he loved as a child,
does a piece of it still remain? And the pen
he’s been looking for all week, where does it hide?
His favorite blue cup which the dog broke,
the green linen shirt that at last wore out,
the Chevy convertible that wound up in the junk yard —
Heart has come to think that all these objects are together
along with absent friends, departed family members
and pets that traveled over to the great beyond.
Somewhere, he believes, there’s a place made up
of previous houses, former gardens and furnished
with the vanished furniture his hands have touched.
There missing friends recline on once-loved chairs.
A cat gone for twenty years naps beneath a burning lamp.
Lost clothes fill the closets, lost books line the shelves.
The trees in front, cars in back: Heart would know them all.
These days Heart’s mind sometimes wanders.
He’s in a daze, he’s drifted off or gathering wool,
and he thinks at such times he, too, has disappeared,
that he’s rambling through his composite house,
sipping coffee from his blue cup, tossing a ball
for a mutt he owned when he was six or walking
arm and arm with a friend not seen for years.
You look pale, the friend says, you’ve gotten thinner.
I’ve been away, says Heart, I’ve been away.

~ from Poetry Magazine, 1999

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friday feast: “Oatmeal Deluxe” by Stephen Dobyns (+ a recipe)

February 10, 2017August 27, 2017 ~ jama ~ 82 Comments

Hello, Snowy Winter Morning! What’s for breakfast?

I’ve been an oatmeal-for-breakfast girl for quite some time. Sure, I dallied with cold cereal and Pop-Tarts® in my reckless youth, and even went through a yogurt, fruit, and granola phase. But now, I look forward to starting each day with a warm, comforting bowl of quick cooking oats.

When you live with more than a few bears (300+ and counting), you can’t help but channel Goldilocks. You bask in the fairy tale dimension of porridge, by now having perfected cooking time, addition of milk, maple syrup, berries and nuts to an enviable “just right.”

Some consider oatmeal bland and boring, ooey gooey pablum for the unimaginative. Fie on them, I say! Obviously they haven’t considered oatmeal’s poetic possibilities. Think of Galway Kinnell, who eats his oatmeal with charming companions like John Keats. And then there’s the inimitable Stephen Dobyns, whose tragicomic oatmeal fantasy reads like the magic porridge pot meets roguish Rodin. While some may sow their wild oats, others sculpt them. No time for mushy romance.

Love me, love my oatmeal. How will you shape your destiny?

OATMEAL DELUXE
by Stephen Dobyns

This morning, because the snow swirled deep
around my house, I made oatmeal for breakfast.
At first it was too runny so I added more oatmeal,
then it grew too thick so I added water.
Soon I had a lot of oatmeal. The radio
was playing Spanish music and I became
passionate: soon I had four pots of oatmeal.
I put them aside and started a new batch.
Soon I had eight pots. When the oatmeal cooled,
I began to roll it with my hands, making
small shapes: pigs and souvenir ashtrays. Then
I made a foot, then another, then a leg. Soon
I’d made a woman out of oatmeal with freckles
and a cute nose and hair made from brown sugar
and naked except for a necklace of raisins.
She was five feet long and when she grew harder
I could move her arms and legs without them
falling off. But I didn’t touch her much –
she lay on the table – sometimes I’d touch her
with a spoon, sometimes I’d lick her in places
it wouldn’t show. She looks like you, although
her hair is darker, but the smile is like yours,
and the eyes, although hers are closed. You say:
what has this to do with me? And I should say:
I want to make more women from Cream of Wheat.
But enough of such fantasy. You ask me
why I don’t love you, why you can’t
live with me. What can I tell you? If I
can make a woman out of oatmeal, my friend,
what trouble could I make for you, a woman?

~ from Heat Death: Poems (Atheneum, 1980)

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friday feast: tomatoes will never be the same

January 28, 2011December 22, 2017 ~ jama

Guacamole Goalie/flickr

TOMATOES
by Stephen Dobyns

A woman travels to Brazil for plastic
surgery and a face-lift. She is sixty
and has the usual desire to stay pretty.
Once she is healed, she takes her new face
out on the streets of Rio. A young man
with a gun wants her money. Bang, she’s dead.
The body is shipped back to New York,
but in the morgue there is a mix-up. The son
is sent for. He is told that his mother
is one of these ten different women.
Each has been shot. Such is modern life.
He studies them all but can’t find her.
With her new face, she has become a stranger.
Maybe it’s this one, maybe it’s that one.
He looks at their breasts. Which ones nursed him?
He presses their hands to his cheek.
Which ones consoled him? He even tries
climbing onto their laps to see which
feels most familiar but the coroner stops him.
Well, says the coroner, which is your mother?
They all are, says the young man, let me
take them as a package. The coroner hesitates,
then agrees. Actually, it solved a lot of problems.
The young man has the ten women shipped home,
then cremates them all together. You’ve seen
how some people have a little urn on the mantel?
This man has a huge silver garbage can.
In the spring, he drags the garbage can
out to the garden and begins working the teeth,
the ash, the bits of bone into the soil.
Then he plants tomatoes. His mother loved tomatoes.
They grow straight from seed, so fast and big
that the young man is amazed. He takes the first
ten into the kitchen. In their roundness,
he sees his mother’s breasts. In their smoothness
he finds the consoling touch of her hands.
Mother, mother, he cries, and flings himself
on the tomatoes. Forget about the knife, the fork,
the pinch of salt. Try to imagine the filial
starvation, think of his ravenous kisses.

~ from Velocities: New and Selected Poems 1966-1992 (Viking Penguin, 1994).

——————————————————-

Another good reason not to have plastic surgery.

This one socked me between the eyes. I’m not sure whether I’m more shocked or strangely humored by Dobyns’s police-blotter-like narrative. “Bang, she’s dead,” is so matter-of-fact and perversely comic, and makes me wonder: is this more a story about the narrator of the poem, or a dramedy of the son’s pathetic grief? As with many of his other poems, “Tomatoes” is informed by Dobyns’s journalistic training. I like how he pulled me in from the start and left me contemplating the more profound implications of “just the facts, ma’am.”

Today’s Roundup is being hosted by the lovely and always gracious Elaine Magliaro at Wild Rose Reader. I’m pretty sure she likes tomatoes, but maybe not the ones in this poem. ☺

May you spend a little time with some meaningful fruit this weekend.

friday feast: bark if you approve

September 19, 2008July 4, 2018 ~ jama ~ 23 Comments

HOW TO LIKE IT
by Stephen Dobyns

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and his dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let’s go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let’s tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.

(from VELOCITIES: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 1994)

(Read the rest here.)

Early this morning I was awakened by the first cool air of Fall.

Yep, it’s really coming. It’ll be official on Monday.

Autumn is definitely my favorite season, but its beauty is always tempered by feelings of unease. Another year is ending, where did the time go, have I made any progress — you know, things like that.

So I was thrilled to stumble upon “How to Like It,” by Stephen Dobyns. Maybe you’re already familiar with his work, but he’s new to me. I think he’s one of a very small number of “academics” whose poetry is actually accessible. I’d encountered so many professorial types before whose work was just too obscure and frustrating.

I found “How to Like It” both comic and profound, exacting, a balm to my weary spirit, refreshing and charming. I love how introspection is intertwined with matter-of-fact reality. There is much to be learned from the instinctual, spontaneous life of a dog! And, finally, now I know why I look in the refrigerator so often :).

I look forward to reading more of Dobyns’ poems, and peeking into his highly regarded, Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry (Palgrave Macmillian, 2003).

I highly recommend reading this two-part interview (bookmark it for later if you don’t have time now). It’s like a mini poetry class, and many of the things he discusses (including why some poets write obscure poetry) will resonate, I promise.

Two excerpts:

Language is always a diminishment of what it’s attempting to describe, and thinking of the critical things we know, all those which are critic-based are, for the most part, a diminishment of an idea.

I’m trying to deal with the world, to understand it in some way, to pass to some other kind of level below its surface. The question — it’s been said — that exists in every work of art, poetry or fiction and, I suppose, maybe even in music and painting, is the question How does one live?

Today’s Poetry Friday Roundup is at author amok.

*Don’t forget: You have until midnight tonight (EST) to leave a comment at my interview with Maha Addasi, for a chance to win a signed, personalized copy of The White Nights of Ramadan.

Have a beautiful weekend!