REELY'S POETRY BLOG

Here are two excerpts from Reginald Gibbons’ book, Creatures of a Day:

THE YOUNG WOMAN
The young woman did office work,
wore short skirts and heels, made herself
up, in very still morning when
I was a hybrid of boy and
some creature without kind, she would
step out of the rented place, walk
through the coarse dew-damp grass across
our back yard, come out the clanking
gate in our chain-link fence, tiptoe
past the outside wall of the bedroom
my brother and I shared, …

Ode: at a twenty-four hour gas station
Around cold midnight, around the front end of my car with its hood up,
five young guys from Mexico, not like me, their father could be on
farms, are crowding in, staring at the workings, and knowing
one, after an hour and a half of waiting for the replacement parts
to be delivered and after having worked on other cars in the meantime,
teaching the others,

Is replacing the busted radiator, more for is audience than for me …

In this extraordinary book, Gibbons’ takes the reader along with him as he comes in contact with a cast of characters from a homeless woman in Chicago to the above encounter in a gas station. He also delves into the early life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, when the Lake Poet was in his twenties, in comparison to his own life.

This is the type of collection to read and re-read and you may very well find yourself living in the poem’s moment as you recognize a similar feeling or experience, but just couldn’t put it down in writing quite like this.

A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets since 2003, Frank Bidart has been teaching at Wellesley College since 1972. He has been honored with many award throughout his life, the most recent being the Bollingen Prize in American Poetry last year.

Here is a poem of his that looks at the process of writing poetry:

The Old Man at the Wheel

Measured against the immeasurable
universe, no word you have spoken

brought light. Brought
light to what, as a child, you thought

too dark to be survived. By exorcism
you survived. By submission, then making.

You let all the parts of that thing you would
cut out of you enter your poem because

enacting there all its parts allowed you
the illusion you could cut it from your soul.

Dilemmas of choice given what cannot
change alone roused you to words.

As you grip the things that were young when
you were young, they crumble in your hand.

Now you must drive west, which in November
means driving directly into the sun.

(Frank Bidart, from the October 2007 issue of Poetry.)

Although, alas, he does not have a website, there is a free download of an audio of this poem at the Poets.org. The download includes readings by Rita Dove, Robert Hass, Lyn Hejinian, Galway Kinnell and many others.

Poet, Mark Doty, is the winner in the National Book Awards poetry category for 2008. This year’s winners received a bronze statue and $10,000.

His poetry collection, Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems (HarperCollins) beat out 4 other nominees:

Frank Bidart, Watching the Spring Festival (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Reginald Gibbons, Creatures of a Day (Louisiana State University Press)
Richard Howard, Without Saying (Turtle Point Press)
Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press)

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