THIRTY-SEVEN CENTS
Vol. 5, No. 9 An Online Chapter of Missouri State Poetry Society September 2006

POEMS AND APPLES

Early in his career Robert Frost wrote a beautiful poem called "After Apple-Picking," which operates on at least two levels: the first level is the literal account of harvesting an apple crop; the second level is a symbolic level in which the apple harvest seems to represent a lifetime of work [see the poem at http://www.bartleby.com/118/10.html]. For the poet the apple-picking is the industry of writing poems--the apples are poems. As summer ends and the fall harvest begins, perhaps we should inventory our crop. Are you pleased with your apple-picking this year? Most of us have probably settled for the minimum number of poems required by membership in a poetry group such as Thirty-Seven Cents. Some have gone beyond this basic endeavor by entering contests such as the MSPS Summer Contest which just closed. Still others have considered collecting their published poems into chapbooks. Whatever you have done or haven't done, there is still a little time before the harvest. Beautiful apples can grace your table this winter if you get to work now. Don't get discouraged. Remember, if you don't write the perfect poems you wish you could, you can always make apple cider--even out of wormy apples. -- Tom Padgett

CONTENTS:

Past Issue Next

Poems by Members

Workshop

Missouri State Poetry Society

Winter Contest

Spare Mule Online

National Federation of State Poetry Societies

Strophes Online

POETRY IN THE NEWS

What is Seamus Heaney up to these days? Click here to see how his latest collection stacks up, according to Brad Leithauser?
What is the latest book by the newest national poet laureate? Read parts of Dan Chiasson's review of Donald Hall's White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems. 1946-2006. Click here

Was Narcissus a poet? How self-obsessed are poets by their nature? Read this essay on Paul Zweig, who defended self-obsession twenty-five years before it became the cultural thing to do.

Have you discounted much contemporary poetry as too obscure to occupy your time? How do you distinguish subtle poetry from difficult poetry? Read this review of Elizabeth Bishop's latest book for help.

How important is poetry in your life? Would you like to know how several Americans responded to this question in a recent poll? Click here to see.

Click Back on your toolbar to return here after finishing the column.

HAVE YOU VISITED THE WORKSHOP LATELY?

Click Workshop and do some of the lessons there.
If you have an idea for a new lesson, send it along.

HAVE YOU READ YOUR ONLINE NEWSLETTERS?

Read Spare Mule Online and Strophes Online available to you by clicking the underlined titles.

HAVE YOU ENTERED A MSPS CONTEST RECENTLY?

Our new state president, Dale Ernst, is encouraging us to enter the MSPS Winter Contest.

HAVE YOU SEEN THE BULLETIN BOARD LATELY?

Visit our MSPS Bulletin Board for news of events and contests in our area.

AMERICAN LIFE IN POETRY

Ted Kooser, current U. S. Poet Laureate, in response to an interviewer for National Public Radio, stated that his "project" as laureate was to establish a weekly column featuring contemporary American poems supported by The Poetry Foundation, The Library of Congress, and the Department of English at the University of Nebraska. This column appears in on-line publications (such as Thirty-Seven Cents) as well as hard-copy newspapers. Poets are asked to contact their local newspapers to inform them that such a column is available free to them and to relieve the editor by explaining that all of the poems that will appear week by week are accessible, not obscure poems.

American Life in Poetry: Column 069
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
2004-2006

This marvelous poem by the California poet Marsha Truman Cooper perfectly captures the world of ironing, complete with its intimacy. At the end, doing a job to perfection, pressing the perfect edge, establishes a reassuring order to an otherwise mundane and slightly tawdry world.

IRONING AFTER MIDNIGHT
Marsha Truman Cooper

Your mother called it
"doing the pressing,"
and you know now
how right she was.
There is something urgent here.
Not even the hiss
under each button
or the yellow business
ground in at the neck
can make one instant
of this work seem unimportant.
You've been taught
to turn the pocket corners
and pick out the dark lint
that collects there.
You're tempted to leave it,
but the old lessons
go deeper than habits.
Everyone else is asleep.
The odor of sweat rises
when you do
under the armpits,
the owner's particular smell
you can never quite wash out.
You'll stay up.
You'll have your way,
the final stroke
and sharpness
down the long sleeves,
a truly permanent edge.

American Life in Poetry: Column 071
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
2004-2006

William Carlos Williams, one of our country's most influential poets and a New Jersey physician, taught us to celebrate daily life. Here Albert Garcia offers us the simple pleasures and modest mysteries of a single summer day.

AUGUST MORNING
Albert Garcia

It's ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife's eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect--
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?

American Life in Poetry: Column 070
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
2004-2006

As a man I'll never gain the wisdom Sharon Olds expresses in this poem about motherhood, but one of the reasons poetry is essential is that it can take us so far into someone else's experience that we feel it's our own.

MY SON THE MAN
Sharon Olds

Suddenly his shoulders get a lot wider,
the way Houdini would expand his body
while people were putting him in chains. It seems
no time since I would help him to put on his sleeper,
guide his calves into the gold interior,
zip him up and toss him up and
catch his weight. I cannot imagine him
no longer a child, and I know I must get ready,
get over my fear of men now my son
is going to be one. This was not
what I had in mind when he pressed up through me like a
sealed trunk through the ice of the Hudson,
snapped the padlock, unsnaked the chains,
and appeared in my arms. Now he looks at me
the way Houdini studied a box
to learn the way out, then smiled and let himself be manacled.

American Life in Poetry: Column 072
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE
2004-2006

Those who survived the Great Depression of the 1930s have a tough, no-nonsense take on what work is. If when I was young I'd told my father I was looking for fulfilling work, he would have looked at me as if I'd just arrived from Mars. Here the Pennsylvania poet, Jan Beatty, takes on the voice of her father to illustrate the thinking of a generation of Americans.

MY FATHER TEACHES ME TO DREAM
Jan Beatty

You want to know what work is?
I'll tell you what work is:
Work is work.
You get up. You get on the bus.
You don't look from side to side.
You keep your eyes straight ahead.
That way nobody bothers you--see?
You get off the bus. You work all day.
You get back on the bus at night. Same thing.
You go to sleep. You get up.
You do the same thing again.
Nothing more. Nothing less.
There's no handouts in this life.
All this other stuff you're looking for--
it ain't there.
Work is work.

POET OF THE MONTH: JOHN LEAX

John Leax is one of the two featured poets for the Missouri State Poetry Society convention in Lebanon on September 29-30 this year. The other featured poet, Walter Bargen, was our poet of the month in August.

To read a feature article published in Image, go here: http://www.imagejournal.org/aom/leax_john.asp

His poem "Homecoming" is also at this site: http://www.imagejournal.org/back/035/leax_poetry.asp

Find several quotations by Leax at http://www.ivmdl.org/quotables.cfm?category=Community

For a review of his book Grace Is Where I Live, visit http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_n1_v111/ai_14754668

For his poem "To the Gift Giver," visit http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_9_121/ai_n6146583

For a review of his latest book, Tabloid News, visit http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2005/135/22.0.html

Buy a book of Leax's poetry at http://www.half.com/, or http://www.powells.com/,
or at http://www.amazon.com/ He will bring copies of two of his books for signing at the convention.

POEMS BY MEMBERS

GUARANTEED IF . . . !
Bev Conklin

"Just stick on this patch

and your weight will go south!"

Sounds too good to be true.

Is it guaranteed, too?

"Of Course" was the reply,

"but," he adds with a sigh,

Only if it is placed

directly over your mouth!"

AT THE PARK
Steven Penticuff
A 3 x 3

Overheard
at play group:
giggling moms

talk about
hubbies and
how to please.

Freshly snipped?
A bag of
frozen peas

EVERY SO OFTEN
Gwen Eisenmann

Every so often she plays her lyre for me;
and words I'm thinking
fall into music
making pathways of sound
like waves of leaves in breeze,
her fingers coaxing sunlight to hum
and then she leaves --
leaving me with a poem.

SUMMER'S END
Sharina Smith

I have always hated summer
the end of spring’s potential
school’s out
no more fun
work work work
make the garden grow
shear the sheep
clean the barns
mow the lawn
slap the mosquitoes
dread the poison ivy
check for ticks
fill the compost pile
with endless scraps
of cucumber peels
and melon rinds
onion skins
and carrot tops
to mix in
with the barn’s contribution
all rotting in that
moist messy mixture
steeping in the sun
to make the garden grow
when we mix it in the soil
this fall with the leaves
summer will be over
oh how I love
the end of summer
new pencils and glue
new books and paper
new crayons all sharp
new teachers to love
new friends and old
to celebrate the start
of intellect’s new adventure
I put up the hoe
and smile as the sun
sets on summer

SEPTEMBER SERENADE
Valerie Esker

There rings a song my children dread
though it sends rapture through my head.

They dislike the symphony,
that siren song that sets Mom free--

free from kid cacophony,
of sibling fights . . . at least till 3:00!

A serenade, September brings
when finally, the school bell rings.

1 + 1 = 3
Ben Nielson

My brain is numb
But is still hurts

I am done writing
yet I am still typing

I cannot talk
But I am giving a speech

Easy has become complicated
Hard has become impossible

I think I have a test soon . . .

PIERCING TALES
Harding Stedler

On the winding roads
of Eastern Kentucky,
I came upon a cabin
of a mountain man
near a grove of pines
beside a strip mine.
The fact we bonded instantly
is undeniable.

He collected arrowheads
--had a plethora of them--
each with a story to tell.

Though he spoke in dialect,
telling their many stories
and using expressions
that were new to me,
I did not find the listening torture.
Instead, I clung to every word,
mesmerized by his rhetoric.

AN ANGEL'S HEART
Jean Even

Angels' hearts are full of love,
Glad to serve throughout eternity.
When they feel pain up above,
God sends them down to eradicate.

He came to destroy
With pain in his heart.
His sword was raised to deploy,
Ready for the awful blow.

God repented his decision
To annihilate men because of their sins.
He stayed His servant’s hand with precision,
Taking away the pain of destruction.

GOD AND H.T.
Pat Durmon

A huge grannymobile with skipping brakes,
elegant and sassy to a man who measures
and treasures classy automobiles, somehow
rolled over on my neighbor— which dragged,
then crushed him in a ditch.

God walks that mountain road every day,
but I wonder if those tall pines didn’t give out
a heavy sigh when they heard the near and drear
sounds come from a man who was dear
and who would leave forever.

EMERITUS
Tania Gray

I won't go back to school this year
when others' days off disappear;
for me no summer's end curfew,
for me no school staff rendezvous:
I'll stay at home and give a cheer.

No navy uniforms austere,
no girls and boys to commandeer;
in June I bid them all adieu--
I won't go back.

It's time for me all ties to shear
from regimens strict and severe.
Retired at last, my teaching's through.
I'll write in reams, I'll overdo,
I've spread out all my painting gear--
I won't go back.

AM I COOL?
David Van Bebber

Cool.
It’s like the California Raisins.
In for a while,
gone for twenty years,
Then back again.

Or Mr. T.
Copy-written
only to be mass produced
by retailers to a public,
ignorant of its beginning,
condescending,
not concerned with its A-team history,
just wanting in.

A foursquare championship t-shirt
worn by a boy with a lip ring
and no idea
how to play four square,
doesn't even know it's a real game.

This concept,
Cool.
It tells you what to think without giving thought,
only to tell you later you don't fit in.

THE SHADOW OF PEACE, FOR YOU AND ME
Henrietta Romman

No sun, when clouds hide a bright ray.
Darkness reigns like a dimmed halo.
Lift your head high for faith to glow,
Then seek peace, contemplate, and pray.

No peace where greed meets sons of God.
Trust moves, sureness, hope, disappear.
"Lord, as Your Spirit holds me near
You, Your heart speaks more than a rod.

"Take my hand, lift me, hold my eye
To perceive Your truth, grant me peace,
Touch each day, may Your voice not cease,
End the pain. You alone have I."

ARTISTS AT WORK
Laurence Thomas

My niece is an artist, I’ll give her that.
She wants me to draw for her a cat
so she can make one, too, on her own.
What I manage to draw looks more like a rat.

She tells me the nose is a bit too nosey
and the eyes should be round, not squinty and dosey.
So I draw it that way and my niece gives a groan
saying my cat could never be comfy and cosy.

So I draw her a cat curled up on her lap
with its eyes shut tight as if taking a nap,
but she says it’s not cuddly, too much like a stone.
I never can please her; I feel caught in a trap

but come up with an answer I think will suffice.
I give her my crayon and some helpful advice:
“If you want something done well, make it your own,”
and she drew me a picture of two perfect mice.

NINTH-MONTH CLUSTER
Pat Laster

one persimmon falls
then two more . . . clumsy squirrel
or over-ripe fruit?

tightening the rope
on the cardboard box
he calls his luggage

“You’re out!”
newly-fired umpire’s
last message

a great blue heron
between the empty beach chair
and the rising tide

the hairless hatchling
sprawls across the three eggs
still in the nest

dressed in gang clothes
and playing Puff Daddy songs
his pallbearers

after the first frost
homerun ball hit in the weeds
now visible

her father
on home schooling…”We wouldn’t
change it for nothing.”

his hair whiter
the day after burying
his wife

HUMIDITY
Diane Auser Stefan
Two Haiku

Icky, sticky air
weighs down mind body and breath
oh, for a sweet breeze

On such a hot day
even the truck's diesel breeze
cools my patch of air

COUNTRY MUSIC
Tom Padgett

You don't shoot my shotgun anymore.
To me, you meant more than my gun.
With you, I spent years hunting fun
until you went--and we were done,
so you don't shoot my shotgun anymore.

You don't pat my coonhound anymore.
You loved my pet, or else you lied
when at the vet's you cursed and cried,
but now I bet you're glad it died
since you don't pat my coonhound anymore.

You don't drive my pickup anymore.
You brought good luck I used to say,
and then bad struck on that dark day
a bigger truck took you away
where you don't drive my pickup anymore.

You don't sing my love songs anymore.
There was a time when what I said
you set to rhyme, but now instead
I find I'm all alone in bed,
for you don't sing my love songs anymore.

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