Poetry – Page 4 – Green Chair Press Blog

The Hinge of Spring

Happy March Equinox—or the beginning of Spring here in North America. My garden is just starting to show some green, and rabbits have begun appearing in my flower beds with alarming regularity. In praise of the rabbit and spring, here is a video of how to fold an origami rabbit (originally found on How about orange). The stamp to the left was issued by the Royal Mail in 2010. And lastly a wry poem my Mom sent me, by Kay Ryan, The Hinge of Spring

The jackrabbit is a mild herbivore
grazing the desert floor,
quietly abridging spring,
eating the color off everything
rampant-height or lower.

Rabbits are one of the things
coyotes are for. One quick scream,
a few quick thumps,
and a whole little area
shoots up blue and orange clumps.

Mezzotints

One of my pleasures at Codex last week was the table next to mine—Mission Gallery—print sellers in San Juan Bautista, California. One of their artists, Mikio Watanabe, is a Japanese man living in France, who designs and prints quite beautiful mezzotints. The gallery was at Codex because Wantanabe has made a book of his prints that include several haiku. The haiku were written in English (by Sheila Sondik), then translated into Japanese by Watanabe’s wife. The English and Japanese haikus are printed letterpress along with the mezzotints. Watanabe and his wife attended the book fair where he sat at the table and worked on a mezzotint plate for a demonstration later in the week. It was fascinating to watch. Here’s a page out of the book, you can see more here.

Why We Should Memorize

Last December, at a Christmas party, someone handed out little booklets of lyrics & we gathered around the table and sang carols. I was quite surprised how many of the songs I knew by heart, sometimes more than even one verse. I’ve thought about this off and on since, asking myself if there’s anything else I’ve memorized (nothing has presented itself yet, save the multiplication tables I learned in grade school).
My favorite book of poetry is Poem a Day, with an introduction that starts

Once upon a time men and women of sense and sensibility knew by heart dozens of poems—Shakespeare’s sonnets, stirring patriotic verse, odes to churchyards and elegies for the departed, the music of Swinburne or Poe or Yeats. Poems are meant to be voiced and A Poem a Day includes 366 poems old and new—one for each day of the year—worth learning by heart. Only two criteria were demanded of each poem for inclusion in this collection—it had to be short enough to learn in a day, and good enough to stand among the great poetry of the English language.

And while I’ve read through the poems numerous times, I’m afraid I’ve never been tempted to memorize any.
Then last week I read Brad Leithauser’s piece on the New Yorker’s blog, Why We Should Memorize. He says Memorized poems are a sort of larder, laid up against the hungers of an extended period of solitude, and a lot more. Read it here.

This book neither swaggers nor complains

… ; it rests in the hand; it breathes.

This is Robert Bringhurst’s review of Moon, David Romtvedt’s first book-length collection of poetry, letterpress printed with handset type by Gerald Lange. I thought that line was quite beautiful, and hope I can print a book one day that deserves that sort of praise! You can see a few more pictures here. And read one of Romtvedt’s poets here.

Prompt Challenge: Birds and em-dashes (part 2)

cardinal I’m working on a book with an Emily Dickinson poem in it (see my first post here), and thinking about using stained glass windows like the one to the left as illustrations. A double-sided accordion, where you can see the windows from the front and the back, seems like it’s worth pursuing. But what text to put on the back of the accordion? Dickinson to the rescue… The following poem has bird imagery and the same number of stanzas and many em-dashes, so it seems like a good candidate:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I’ve heard it in the chillest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet—never—in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of me.

My current idea is to print the window illustrations on tissue or rice paper, cut holes in the accordion and affix the tissue over the cutout. Light could then come through the “window,” and the illustration would be the same on both the front and back.

Prompt Challenge: Birds and em-dashes

bobolink Earlier this year, I started a prompt challenge where I used a word a week to inspire some bookmaking. It was a lot of work, and I gave up in exhaustion after a couple of months. But it certainly generated a lot of ideas and led to several new books. Now I’m going to try a different sort of prompt — specific poems.
Bear with me while I get to the poem I’m going to try…. I use em-dash (the long one —) when I write out my haiku, but my set of metal Bembo only has the short en-dash, so when I handset Summer in Vermont, I used periods instead of dashes. This fall I finally got around to buying some em-dashes. In the meantime I started drawing the birds that congregate at the bird feeder in my front yard.
Then my Mom sent me some Emily Dickinson poems, notorious for the use of the em-dash. One poem in particular struck me as perfect for a prompt challenge, as it uses bird imagery and plenty of dashes.

Some keep the Sabbath going to Church —
I keep it, staying at Home —
With a Bobolink for a Chorister —
And an Orchard, for a Dome —

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —
I, just wear my Wings —
And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,
Our little Sexton — sings.

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —
And the sermon is never long,
So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —
I’m going, all along.

When I think of churches, the first thing that comes to mind is stained glass windows, so my initial idea is to combine windows and bird images — that’s one I did of a bobolink above. I’m not giving myself a deadline on this one, but I’ll keep reporting back as I get more ideas and build models…