Poem In Your Pocket

It's Poem-in-Your-Pocket Day! (I wonder why it's so late this year--one of the most fun parts of National Poetry Month should be earlier in the month, I think.) It's hard to celebrate this year, as I'm going nowhere (maybe I'll get some takeout for dinner, but I still won't leave my car) and, also, my pants don't have pockets. Still, I can at least post some poems here!

I don't know that I've found a poem in The Best American Poetry 2020 that I'd pocket. (Julian Gewirtz' "To X (Written On This Device You Made") is too long.) I realized I hadn't yet posted a cover pic of the collection, though, and thought this was a good opportunity to do so. Fencers are always cool, right? 

One of my favorite poems to use as a pocket poem is Yehuda Amichai's "The Ballad of the Washed Hair." (I think Lilith is using Chana Bloch's translation, but I'm not sure.) I don't why exactly I find this poem so compelling. I do like long hair. There's the mix of the personal and the historical, the mundane and the mythical. The girl is objectified (or at least eroticized) but she's also powerful, and not just in terms of sex appeal. (It's a rare example of a positive Delilah figure.) I love "The scent of her drying hair/is prophesying in the streets and among stars." There's a blend of melancholy and hope. It's also a good pocket poem because it's relatively short. I wonder, though, how much of the poem's resonance comes from that final image. What will readers for whom telephone books were never a daily reality think of the poem--would the ending seem flat to Eliot? What will Bernadette or Edie think if they read this poem as young women? (And how will awareness of events and realities in the Middle East color future readings? This is one of Amichai's less political poems, but I always carry an awareness of him as an Israeli poet.)

Ha, I've linked to this poem at Lilith before and never read the others in the "Hair and Desire" feature. "I'm Letting It Grow" by Nancy Blotter is pretty fun.

If I had pockets, I could pocket some of the poems I mentioned in my Tree Poems post.

If I was going to pocket a recent poetic read, it would be something from Lucy Biederman's The Walmart Book of the Dead. (The publisher calls it "experimental fiction"; they're prose poems to me.) I came across this book in one of those authors-recommend-books-by-other-authors articles (I think this one was by Kiley Reid of the intense Such a Fun Age), and I knew I had to read it. That juxtaposition of the mundane and the mythic that I appreciate in "Ballad of the Washed Hair"? It's here on steroids: the cosmic and the commonplace. Titles and subjects are inspired by The Egyptian Book of the Dead, but the details, characters, and scenarios are drawn from contemporary American Walmart and Walmart patrons. There's humour and absurdity, but it's generally not at the characters' expense; these are, indeed, life and death issues at play in the Walmart setting, and they deserve the attention. You can see an example, the "SPELL for Making One Not Have to Work in the Gods' Domain" here. It's actually not my favorite from the book, partly because there's less of the juxtaposition with language from the Papyrus of Ani and partly because I feel the portrait of this individual is a little more negative/less empathetic than most others in the book.

"ROLL of Gods," for example, uses more of that antiquated language, along with some very relatable humour:

O broad gods of the hall of truth, I have ascended unto you, I am among you, here, I live on truth, truth like you, and I know your names--

O patron of the only independent bookstore in a two-hundred-mile radius, I have not wasted my time. ...

O invader of Iraq, who came forth from the boardroom, I have not worn someone else's boots. ...

O grocery store cheque writer, who made longer the endless line, who came forth from the gods' domain, I have not rammed my cart against the cart in front of it, creating a riot. ...

"SPELL to Enter Through the Gates of Night" demonstrates a perhaps radical empathy:

 ...ILLUSTRATION: The part of the wall that holds the guns in Walmart throbs, as if lit differently than anything else on earth, constructed from different particles. People on the other side don't understand. Either that, or they turn away, fearing that, in their heart of hearts, they do. ... A weightlifter since high school, he hadn't know anything could be so heavy until he held a gun for the first time. It was a Sig Sauer--just a simple, double action handgun, it hadn't even been loaded. He felt the desire to die when he held it, and, buzzing right alongside that desire, the means to do so. And when he pulled himself back from choosing to use it like that, the choice he had made felt as physical a thing as pulling a hood from his head. ...

If I was making a pocket pick, it might be "SPELL for Hopefulness in the Gods' Domain," about a Walmart security officer. "Initially, he was hesitant to accept this job, but not because he thought it might involve becoming a father-figure-type to a bunch of kids whose families live in cars. If he had known that all this extra emotional stuff would be involved, he never would have taken the job." It's tragicomic.