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Bwog editor Mariela Quintana tells you about a holiday you might have missed.
There’s been a lot of talk about April being the cruelest month. But what’s everyone got against poor old April? Just look at the facts, April’s got the best holidays – April Fool’s, Earth Day, often Easter, occasionally Passover, always 4/20, and Al Green’s birthday’s on the 13th. But April 17th celebrates the loveliest day of all, Poem in Your Pocket Day.
In honor of National Poetry Month (April), PIYP encourages you, dear Bwog reader, to print out a poem that you enjoy or perhaps that you have even written. As you carry it in your pocket, read your poem to as many or as few people as you so wish – don’t be shy, let the inner poet come out!
The holiday is meant to honor not just Erato – our divine Muse of the Lyric Line – but also to promote poetry, literacy an the arts. Today’s celebration will culminate with an open mic reading in Byrant Park. And there’s even a website, so it’s legit!
After the jump, Bwog offers some pocket-friendly poems.
For those with petite pockets:
“This Is Just To Say”
by William Carlos Williams
For the tentative romantic:
“Spring is like a perhaps hand”
by E. E. Cummings
For the Brooding Senior on a Bulter Break:
“Sonnets 04: Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended”
By Edna St. Vincent Millay
For the Debbie Downer in us all:
“Nothing Gold Can Stay”
By Robert Frost
For the artist in us:
“In My Craft Or Sullen Art”
By Dylan Thomas
For anyone who has waited for a train at 96th street:
“Subway Wind”
By Claude McKay
For the lover of the Lost and Found:
“One Art”
By Elizabeth Bishop
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@timely The Pope’s Penis
Sharon Olds
It hangs deep in his robes, a delicate
clapper at the center of a bell.
It moves when he moves, a ghostly fish in a
halo of silver seaweed, the hair
swaying in the dark and the heat—and at night
while his eyes sleep, it stands up
in praise of God.
@in my pocket All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
@Hass Avocadoes O plowless town, snow and wreck and elope.
@my pocket e.e. cummings i am a little church(no great cathedral)
i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
–i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april
my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are prayers of earth’s own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness
around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains
i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
–i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing
winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)
@In my pocket MELANCHOLY
by Irving Feldman
The wind tore the sky to tatters
Above the stone bridges of the Seine,
That winter day, the driven rain
Leaned down in long ladders.
And my eye, suspended between
The promised power, the murdered form,
Beheld the luxury of storm,
The pathos of the sighing scene.
Wind, through shreds of greyness scream
And crack the saucers of the stream!
I could not fall, could not rise.
The thought of death, the wind’s sieve,
Gathered all I could not live
And all the rest shook down in cries.
@in my pocket, because it’s perfect for today
Steps
Frank O’Hara
How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget’s steeple leaning a little to the left
here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting’s not so blue
where’s Lana Turner
she’s out eating
and Garbo’s backstage at the Met
everyone’s taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park’s full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we’re all winning
we’re alive
the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building’s no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)
and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining
oh god it’s wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much
@In my pocket The Fall of Rome
W.H. Auden
The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes and abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.
Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.
Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.
Caesar’s double-bed is warm
As an unimportatnt clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.
Unendowed with wealth or pity
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.
Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.
@maggie big ups to WH
@In my pocket PERFECTION WASTED
By John Updike
And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market –
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.