30 Great Poems for April, Day 20: “Emergency Haying” by Hayden Carruth

Read “Emergency Haying” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

This is one of my all-time favorite poems, easily in the top 10. Maybe the top 5. I go back and read this several times a year, and it hooks me in every time. Every stanza, every line, is doing something fascinating.

I’m noticing a theme emerging in this monthlong gathering of favorite poems: I love poems about work*. I love poems written by people who have actually done the work. And I love the honesty of this poem, the acknowledgment that this speaker doesn’t do this work for a living—he’s just helping a neighbor—which makes the images of the physical hardship especially vivid; my hands actually sting when I read this poem.

The religious images, honestly, go right by me. And I know, that’s sad; they’re probably the heart of this poem, so who knows what I’m missing. But let’s just say the Bible is my worst category on Jeopardy!, along with British monarchs and Roman numerals. So I have to set aside the Jesus imagery for someone to explain who is more schooled in it. I’m all about the work itself, and the slightly hallucinatory exhaustion afterward, because I’ve done that, I remember that; I worked so hard (ranch hand, long ago) and got so dirty that the bathwater hurt at the end of the day and literally ran like mud down the drain.

And then Carruth takes us back into the history of field work, of forced labor and slavery, and his images are still raw and immediate—everything that happens to those hands! And by the end, there’s his defiance, a sort of punch-drunk triumph, a strength (even momentary) in being the person who does the work, one of those who actually did the haying and the lifting, the digging and the building. There’s a little discomfort here—he’s already admitted he’s a “desk-servant, word-worker”—but any poet who can help out for a day of haying and go home and write a poem like this is also doing great work.










* Recently I was talking with the poet Tim Applegate, who has written a lot about work that he used to do, which was wood refinishing for hotels and cruise ships—a fascinating topic that you should ask him about if you ever meet him. (See his book Blueprints here.) I mentioned that I rarely see books entirely devoted to the poetry of work, and he said (rightly so) that most “work” poems are about manual labor. We talked about how tactile and kinetic physical work is as opposed to, say, desk work. So I get extra excited about poems that are about the kind of work I do these days, which basically amounts to sitting in a chair and making little clicky-click noises on a keyboard all day (which weirds me out sometimes). Memorably, Stephanie Lenox, whose work is always witty and unexpected, won the 2015 Colorado Prize for Poetry for her book about office work, The Business.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 19: “Mermaids” by Angela Howe Decker

Read “Mermaids” on Sundress Publications’ online poetry series, The Wardrobe, here.

Disclaimer: Angela Decker and I have known each other a really long time*. Her work has an inherent goodness about it, even if the subject matter is dark or angry; her empathy for her fellow humans is always in there. In this poem, she tells the tale of a woman working a very odd job, but one that sparked Angela’s imagination and does the same for the reader.

This poem keeps up a juggling act of tones. It’s laugh-out-loud funny (“like she was a cousin or something”), but also melancholy and—yes, this is in there too—a little ridiculous, a hint of standing back and whispering to the reader, “Can you belive this?” It’s never disrespectful, but it’s always rooted in the real world, so we trust this narrator. Angela’s writing is like that; she will entertain you, but she’ll also tell you the truth. She will give you the goods.

Buy Angela’s chapbook Splendid Catastrophe here.

* When I decided to do this poem-a-day feature, I knew I wanted to include some poets I know personally. But as I started to think about whom to feature, it became like the story my parents used to tell of planning their wedding—“If we invited these people, we had to invite these other people. And if we invited person A, person B would be mad to be left out.” (They couldn't figure it out and ended up eloping.) This thing with friends' poems became a similar diplomatic tangle, the kind we run into a lot in the poetry world. Whom to invite to do a reading? Whom to solicit work from for the journal? Who gets to be in this workshop group? I don’t have an answer to all that, but it occasionally snags our vitally important network of friends and tears at it a little. I’ve been that person with their nose out of joint because I didn’t get picked. I’ve also been the one doing the picking that somebody got angry with. My mantra about all this is an annoyingly simple one that works most of the time: “Let it go. Keep writing.”

[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 18: “Invoking the Muse in Cell Block B” by Nancy Miller Gomez

Read “Invoking the Muse in Cell Block B” in the literary journal Rattle here.

This poem is from Nancy Miller Gomez’s chapbook Punishment, which won the Rattle chapbook prize* last year and details her life teaching writing workshops in prisons. When I got the chapbook in the mail, I had some trepidation, expecting it to be relentlessly grim. But while the book is powerful (as this poem is) all the way through, Gomez has such a deft touch that she can show you facets of the experience you never expected to see—images like the “Doppler shift of footsteps / as guards come and go, their shapeless voices rising / and falling in the halls.” Or that “greenish paint slopped onto cinderblock / so thick it looks like molded cheese.” Sights, sounds, smells—she really puts you in these places, distracted by the details as if you’re sitting there with her. And the people she’s teaching are, well…people. Flawed, vulnerable, sometimes funny. Not monolithic, which, I think, is one of the points she subtly makes.

I particularly like the way she doesn’t try to end the story in this poem; she’s doesn’t look for closure when describing the men in her workshop and the painful circumstances that brought them here: “Each scar provides its own dark facts. / What if the thesis is a bottle smashed / on a body? What if the body / can’t grow wings?” She knows better than to try to tell their tales or predict how their lives might turn out; she’s really just telling her own story of what this world looks like, specifically to her. 

This poem, and others in the book, walk up to that distasteful line that some poems of witness violate—the line of appropriating other people’s stories, mining them for emotion that is second- or third-hand and shouldn’t have been borrowed in the first place. But this poem and this book don’t cross that line. As the reader, you never forget that this writer is a stranger in this land, and that she gets to leave it whenever she wants, and she knows that that privilege sets her apart. And yet we’re not clubbed with that message; the message is embedded, along with a bounty of humanity, in these remarkably graceful poems.

You can buy Punishment right here.

* A tough feat, since that contest gets more than 1,500 chapbook manuscripts submitted each year. I lost again this year and am in good company.

[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 17: “Mimesis” by Fady Joudah

Read “Mimesis” on the Poetry Foundation site here.

Oh, man, that last line.

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American physician who was born in Texas, grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia, and now lives in Houston, where he works as an emergency-room doctor. (His poems have a gentleness that I can only hope bely his bedside manner as a physician.) Somewhere in his busy doctor’s life, he’s found time to publish work in many of the top literary journals, win the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, and publish several well-received books. I tell you all this because, people: This is a poet you should know about.

And while a poem, generally speaking, should stand on its own, without the scaffolding of the poems around it in the little microcity of a book, or the celebrity of the writer of whatever—yes, still, when you know a little about the poet, sometimes their work is infused with something extra, a deeper-felt appreciation you wouldn’t have otherwise.

And to that, here’s the definition of mimesis (I had to look it up): “imitation, in particular: [meaning 2] the deliberate imitation of the behavior of one group of people by another as a factor in social change. Zoology: another term for mimicry.” There are so many levels of mimicry going on in this poem—spider mimicking human habitation, father mimicking the oppressor, daughter questioning that chain, and ultimately (we sense) father mimicking daughter. And it’s short—so, so short! Think of what he could have cluttered it up with and chose not to.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 16: “Dead Horse” by Thomas Lux

Read “Dead Horse” on the Academy of American Poets site here.

I told you there would be more horses! And while a poem called “Dead Horse” wouldn’t normally be one I’d be drawn to (how macabre and insensitive might it get?), Thomas Lux had a way of combining the heartfelt with the eminently practical. And really, that’s how most horse people are, at least the ones who’ve been at it a long time; they’re used to dealing with big animals and lots of land and the very hard work that keeps that all together.

Look how this poem starts: the death, right there. We see it as the speaker saw it. And what is going on with that strange line that ends in an ellipse (“before he hit the...”)? Honestly, I don’t know, but this poem just has me in so deep, so fast, that I’ll pretty much take whatever it’s giving. And the backhoe “grinding towards us”—only someone who’s lived that would know that “grinding” is the perfect word. And note that the trench, not the grave, is cut, not dug—all specific words of this work. And the stones never seen before, and the “one dumb cow.” (I swear, every person who has horses thinks horses are the smartest animals. Unless they also have mules.)

But the kicker, the thing I love most about this poem, is the last three lines. The part that has nothing to do with horses. The flatness, the frankness, the banality* of those lines. For me, this pushes the poem into a higher realm, the voice of true memoir.

On my drive to work, I pass several ranches with cattle and horses. One has a lone horse that shares a large field with several enormous cattle. I think about this poem every time I see that field, which is every single day. This poem also makes me think about a stable-owner I knew in Massachusetts who owned a 200-year-old barn, a solid stone building set into a hillside. She once told me that her mare had died in that barn a few years earlier, and they hadn’t been able to drag the body out of there—too heavy, and too many corners to get around—so they had to bring in a crane, tear off part of the roof, and lift out the horse’s body. I love how this poem documents the kind of effort that takes—the real, and unglamorous, side of living around these beautiful animals.





*A little Thomas Lux trivia: I saw him teach a workshop a few years back, and he said the word “banal” at one point—which he pronounced “BAY-nuhl.” Maybe I’m too West Coast, but I’d never heard it pronounced like that. I’m a “rhymes with canal” type. I can still see him saying it, with me thinking, “What the hell is that word?”







[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 15: “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead” by Jane Hirshfield

Read “The Dead Do Not Want Us Dead” in the literary journal Pangolin House here.

This is my go-to funeral poem. That sounds crass, but really, everybody needs at least one poem that will make people feel better after someone they loved has died. And what better poem than this one, with its very real people, their skipping, their bad jokes? This poem is disarming, and a little funny, and also very, very tender. And it poses a genuine question: Would not any dead person want to be back on Earth for a little while, just for the pleasures? Wouldn’t that be the greatest gift we could give them? And isn’t that, in turn, the greatest gift we have, our time on Earth?

I know that whenever I read this poem, I think of my dad—what would he want to come back to do? I’m hoping he’d want to eat ice cream with me at Baskin-Robbins. Him with his little pink plastic spoon, me with my much-too-large double scoop cone, some Tommy Dorsey on the store PA, my dad tapping his feet. Someone once scolded him, “Can’t you take anything seriously?” He thought that was the funniest thing ever; he repeated that story for years, a badge of honor.

The first time I read this poem was in a “Poets for Peace” anthology that I picked up at a reading at SFSU’s San Francisco Poetry Center. Poems for peace are all fine and well, but really, I think this is a poem for joy.









[All through April, I’m featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]

30 Great Poems for April, Day 14: “Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others” by Ross Gay

Read "Within Two Weeks the African American Poet Ross Gay is Mistaken for Both the African American Poet Terrance Hayes and the African American Poet Kyle Dargan, Not One of Whom Looks Anything Like the Others" on the Poetry magazine site here.

I think about this poem all the time. Since I first read it a few years ago, it’s become a touchstone for something I’ve seen happen many times in my own largely white community—people of color getting mistaken for other people of color. The title makes it sound like the poem might be funny, but it isn’t. At all. It’s about how deeply wounding this experience was. It’s about not letting those (presumably white) people off the hook. This poem looks you right in the eye and asks you to think about what’s wrong with objectifying a whole race, even if it’s in a momentary glance and an assumption made. As a white reader, I’m forced by this poem to acknowledge that I’ve done this very thing and sometimes still do.

At first glance, this poem does everything to disarm you: The title could be sort of funny, and it’s an invitingly short poem, which implies you might be in for a light read. After that extremely long title, the poem’s line lengths are even short, which looks sort of comical at first, and then there’s the seeming joke about good hair in the second line. But then the poem turns its full face to you: “I’ll correct you / and tell you it’s about history,” and by the time you get to “knuckles and teeth for sale,” you know this poem means business; this poem really is about history and where we are in that history. So the title starts out uncomfortable, though it could be leading you into a comedy, but before long you understand this is not a comedy; this is all about discomfort. A white reader walks out of this poem feeling bad, the way you might feel after a play that made you look at something in yourself you didn’t want to see. This poem is doing some very hard work.

Another clever thing about this poem has to do with that long title: How can that not stick in your mind? You can almost see African American people everywhere nodding in recognition. And white people everywhere cringing, also in recognition. How more ridiculously, painfully true could that title be? Now that you’ve seen it, will you ever be able to forget it?





[All through April, I'm featuring a favorite poem every day, along with a link where you can read it. Some are classics, some are newer, but each one is the kind of poem that I read, love, and immediately want to tell all my friends about. What better to time to share them than National Poetry Month?]