Maybe it’s because a poet played a visible role in the Obama inauguration. Maybe it is Denver’s burgeoning poetry scene. Or because April is National Poetry Month — a time when schools and bookstores, publishers and literary organizations, libraries and poets from around the country recognize and celebrate poetry — and its place in American culture. But whatever the reason, poets are making headlines.
The timing couldn’t be better: In this digital age where torrents of information fly at us at warp speed, National Poetry Month offers an opportunity to take stock, slow down and smell the syllables.
Today, we introduce you to three Colorado poets who are making the region a more imaginative place.
Julie Carr
is the author of “Mead: An Epithalamion, and Equivocal.” She teaches writing and literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder and is the co-publisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press (counterpathpress ). Recent work can be found in The Nation, New American Writing and Parthenon West. Carr will read from her work April 26 from 6 to 6:30 p.m. on “The Poetry Show,” on Fort Collins’ KRFC. Listen online at .
Noun Poem
By Julie Carr
A man in need of a bird of yarn
enters a town with two suns
The bird unwinds its tale of read
in which a woman paints a postcard for her son
This is a sentence with two nouns
One is the noun we all know
the other will be formed of the wealth of the first:
a widower in search of a bride
Yes? I am thirsty, he says with laden head,
can I have a glass of milk, Mom?
She fills him a glass and watches him drink
the brush poised in her hand
The bird and boy whistle one to the other
red spooling from incongruous mouths
This is a song with two swallows
The other gathers others in the skies
This, a sentence with two eyes
One sits within his like an egg in a nest
the last spills as it mates, as it cries
first published in New American Writing
Denver Post: What is your artistic inspiration?
Carr: Reading — my mother was a big reader, books everywhere; being with my children; daily life, and the fragility of daily life inspire me. And my artistic inspiration comes from things that are in some ways mysterious and undecipherable. I think that’s really the impetus of art — that it comes from a place of mystery, unfinished and open, unknowing. Freedom.
DP: Who are your favorite poets?
Carr: As a child, at the age of 7 or 8, I picked up an Emily Dickinson poem that began, “This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me. …” The feelings and drama of childhood. So I thought I’d also write to the world.
Children get poetry because they understand that words have meaning when they’re up against rhythm. It’s what kids do. They play with words, sounds, rhythm. Theodore Roethke also inspired me when I was young, but my favorites are Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins — Hopkins because of his use of sound. And that doesn’t even touch on the contemporary poets.
DP: Why do you think poetry is important?
Carr: It’s important in the same way the arts are important. Those who are reading it experience pleasure — are able to be excited by the mysteries of life. Poetry, like any art, alerts you or awakens you. Those that do live with poetry, at whatever level, are listening to language differently, hear beauty, nuance and the strange juxtapositions that happen in ordinary speech all the time. They experience the way that language plays with itself, and that deepens one’s experience with language, and one’s interest in, and with, the world. More awake.
Bin Ramke
was born in East Texas, attended Louisiana State University and the University of New Orleans, then Ohio University. He taught for nine years in Georgia, and since 1984 at the University of Denver, where he now holds the Phipps Chair in English, is an Evans Professor, teaches creative writing and contemporary literature, and edits the Denver Quarterly. His 10th book will be published this fall. His wife, Linda, is also a writer, as is his son, Nicolas.
Cajun, a Corruption of “Arcadian,” or of a Mi’Kmawi’Simk Term for “Fullness”
By Bin Ramke
I am often confused by the words “equal” and “between.” To say one thing is another thing is like saying . . . one thing. And what separates them. There were several major storms in my past, and then there were two, separately named, which killed three-fourths of the trees of New Orleans. The trees of the Gulf Coast will continue decaying into the atmosphere, little particles of tree dancing into the air, carbon mainly, and even my mother’s body will be little particles in the earth and then air and there will be rains thus into earth again. The French who made a life with the help of the Mi’kmaq were dispersed into the colonies. Ethnic cleansing. Clean air. Clean water. Clean land.
Previously unpublished
Denver Post: What inspires you artistically?
Ramke: Well, quite a number of things. But I would almost have to begin my answer by questioning the whole concept of “inspire.” Maybe because I’m the oldest of who you’re talking to, and have been doing this a long time, I’d have to say that I’m almost always or never inspired. The word inspire means to breathe in, and the whole concept was that the gods or muses would select a person and breathe into them, giving them what would turn into a poem. Breath is a big element of thinking about poetry. Because I’ve been doing this for so long, my breathing involves my idea of poetry. Poetry is a way of thinking and being aware. It’s sort of always turned on. I don’t any longer see much of a boundary between the ordinary everyday world and that that gets turned into, or comes out of, poems.
DP: Who are your favorite poets?
Ramke: Well, I started in college as a mathematics major, but it was in an English class that I started reading Wallace Stevens, an American poet who died in 1955. His work caused me to begin writing, and caused me to think I could do this.
Then it becomes really hard to separate people out. This is sort of a strange thing: There was a poet named (Georg) Trakl. There was something about him. Maybe because I’m particularly interested in mental health issues and the relation between poetry and consciousness. For various reasons, I’m particularly involved in and interested in questions of mental health treatment in the country and so forth, but the connection to poetry is that I think, probably, poetry gives a more accurate sense of what you might call the shape of the mind than any other study I know of. Trakl was a pharmacist and he was in the war (World War I), and was required to take care of a large number of people, and he was unqualified to do it. He was under major strain by wanting to help in ways that he couldn’t. His poems were not about that situation, but rather reflect some of that desperate struggle.
A poem is a way of examining the mind. We read a poem and come to a clearer understanding of how consciousness works.
And Julie Carr is a favorite, too. I really admire her writing. I think she’s wonderful.
I have to say that I edit this literary journal, Denver Quarterly, and it’s very hard to single people out because there are so many people who are interesting and exciting and different.
DP: Why do you think poetry is important?
Ramke: I think I’d return to what I was saying about how it gives us access to understanding how we think. And in a certain sense, I wouldn’t claim that poems are important to everyone, but that, instead, we all participate in consciousness that is the center of poetry. So poetry has a kind of secret connection to everyone whether they know it or not.
J. Michael Martinez
received an MFA from George Mason University. His poems have appeared in New American Writing, Five Fingers Review, The Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review and others. He was winner of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize and is co-editor/co-founder of Breach Press. He has poems forthcoming in the anthology “Junta: Avant-Garde Latino/a Writing.” He teaches literature and cultural studies at the University of Northern Colorado. He lives in Boulder.
Denver Post: What inspires you artistically?
Martinez: I suppose it’s an attempt to achieve a clarity and a unity, because so much of what I experience in my own individual world — and the more cultural realm of politics — is fragmented. It’s fragmented and chaotic in the sense that how I experience employing language in poetry is a way for me to clarify and to achieve a certain sense of beauty. That’s not to say that I achieve it, but I aim for it. And the strange and difficult thing that beauty is — I have a yearning for it, and I hope to one day achieve that in a poem. The other aspect of that is that poetry always occurs as a community. It’s language so it’s a dialogue. And for me — I operate with language, in a sense, with the theories of Martin Buber, where, at the highest level of communication, there’s this arcing toward a level of the unattainable — and for him, it’s divinity, dwelling with divinity. For me, the concept is sort of old- fashioned — this sort of arcing toward communion is old- fashioned. I definitely have a sense of operating with that in mind.
One other thing that comes to mind is a quote by Reginald Shepherd. He said that poetry aims for the end of poetry, which is unattainable. And I think that’s really true for me and what I try to do.
DP: Who are your favorite poets?
Martinez: Oh, man. The one that I always return to is Rainer Maria Rilke. And then the others that I go back to are Susan Howe , Rosmarie Waldrop, and H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), one of the first Imagist writers. I love all of those writers, and they’re the ones I consistently turn back to for inspiration and a guide to excavate what language is guiding me forward.
DP: Why do you think poetry is important?
Martinez: The first word that came to my mind is reconciliation. And a lot of what deals with language in postmodernism deals with fragmentation of language itself. For me, that’s beautiful. However, what’s implicit in that fragmentation is that language mends at the same time what it’s tearing. What that makes me think of is a quote by Maurice Blanchot, and I’ll paraphrase it. It embodies what I’m trying to say: In fragmentation, in that space between the fragments, is almost a stronger unity because the fragments beckon each other, and are almost a stronger hole than the whole itself. That speaks to the paradox of language to me.
Heredities (4) Amma
By J. Michael Martinez
Maria Jesus y Maria Jesus y Marie,
the voyages of names, black sails inked with their dead,
the No consecreated on my mother’s hand:
Maria Jesus y Maria Jesus y Marie
a thousand serpents crawl along the waves
breaching shore for its salt.
Near ourselves, we return:
Mother, crown where the eye-
lash has fallen through you:
eat the carcass, eat morning’s edge;
at the ends, its past—
where forms of an impossible prison
mark the flesh, where salt is
and Voice walks the garden, tolling
those destined for the plague, to the plague
those destined for captivity, to captivity
those destined for the sword, to the sword;
for those plagued, for those
captive, for those with sword
drink Mother, drink:
the native land language is
is traced eyeless
in the heart,
the law steers you
seasoned with marrow,
tolling the thickness of images.
ii
I have held the palm branch,
I have seen the wheels jeweled
in crest
& swallow:
Mother, you will pass & I will pass with you
into the tabernacle to leave
peerless architecture
the heirs the hands
of weeds
we will boil nostaliga’s carrion
tongue wish taproot
sobre nuestras cabezas en llamas
cartilage
& sound’s nest steamed to stew
we will pour over our hands
these clarities into dirt
& blossom mesquite’s clustered amber
flowers the end
-law of maidens sung by feasting bees:
Maria y Maria y Maria y Maria
in the hive, the honey will host
a name’s leprosy, our pore’s visible ruin.
We will drum the hive & the hive will drum our flesh,
crawling into our swallowing mouths, belly swarmed pregnant,
our nakedness blistered beneath
birth’s stinging harps.
iii
Mother,
you will pass
with you: in me,
the name will be
no cradle to nurse.
Previously unpublished
