“I teach my sighs to lengthen into songs.”
—from The Renewal, Theodore Roethke

This morning, I was reading Roethke on the train (I admit, part of me was trying to block out the news, having been chained to its great sorrow all morning). And the sun is out today in the city; spring is fully upon us and racing full-fledged into summer warmth. The weather and the blooms reminded me of when I was studying as an undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle. It is the spring quarter poetry class that I remember most (I took it only in my senior year, having exhausted all of my other electives from drama to dance). The classroom we were in overlooked the quad where all the cherry trees blossomed in some unnatural frenzy of suggestiveness. We’d read poems and then most of us would stare out the window wide-eyed and restless. I was madly in love of course, as I usually am in the spring. (Aren’t you?) Anyway, my professor, Colleen McElroy, told this story of when Roethke was teaching there (the last place he taught before his death), in that same classroom on the ground floor.

This is a sad story.

We noticed the posters from the first day we were in Paris. "SOS Doudou Perdu!!!" they said in boldface block letters above a photo of a baby's lovey--a stuffed white dog with an enormous nose, cute eyes and blue ears. I took a picture of it but can't upload it; the computers at this Avenue Parmentier internet point won't take my memory card. The posters are full color printouts, with all the elegance of a lost-cat poster and all the pathos of a lost-dog poster.

We notice that the SOS Doudou Perdu posters keep disappearing and being reposted. For who could resist taking one home? French people like children. Not the way Romans like them, with extravagant, voluble bursts of enthusiasm, but by putting little playgrounds all over the place, and carousels and even trampolines in random squares and parks, and by giving everyone free health care and education through university level and a bonus to families that have three children or more. So I believe that many of those who stole the posters did so not only for aesthetic reasons--though that too--but because they fully intended to buy a new Doudou for the child and needed to take along the contact telephone number.

Not realizing that the child didn't want any Doudou, but the Doudou--the only Doudou.

Last time we were in Paris, in 2004, we were staying in the 20th Arrondisement near Place Gambetta, an upscaling neighborhood on the edge of one of the more multicultural areas of Paris. It was winter and you'd see African women in long traditional dresses and flipflops and their elder kids in flipflops and their younger kids in regular children's shoes and it wasn't clear if that was how the money stretched, or if the older kids and mom had been born/grew up in Africa and didn't like closed shoes while the younger ones were conforming to Western footwear.

New Year's Eve we planned ot go out and see what was going on. No specific plans; maybe down to Etoile for the fireworks, maybe not, but definitely out. Earlier in the day we'd been down to the Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and the hideous golden sculpted flame over top of the tunnel where Princess Di died, where to this day people leave notes in memory and dead flowers that wither and fray like autumn leaves all year round. There was a fancy schmancy street market nearby. Jim picked up a duck foie gras for our New Year's Eve dinner. He also impulse-bought a bottle of Chartreuse. Chartreuse is a spicy green 140 proof liqueur. It is not what makes Gervaise die in a sodden heap of rags under the tenement stairs in Zola's L'Assommoir (that's absinthe) but it might as well be.

A few hours before we left for Paris (we are here for a month), William Corbett's new book from Hanging Loose Press, Opening Day, came in the mail, so I stuck it in my carry-on bag. Our first full day here, we do something we like to do soon after we get off the plane and never again during a trip--walk out the Champs-Elysees from Concorde, sit in an overpriced cafe, and watch other tourists walk up and down in their brand-new Paris-bought outfits. Maisie napped in her stroller. I read Bill Corbett alternating with taking notes on fashions. All following poetry quotes are from Opening Day.

Fortune Cookie

Half moon over Fenway Park
over Vermont's sawtooth trees
one ear on the ballgame
open book on lap
moths lovetap the screen
the houses are empty
wine calms the jets,
mud settles; mind unclenches
unknots all who were here.
Living is hard: art easier!
Throw strikes! Walks always
come back to haunt you.

Fady Joudah

1. Your first book of poems, The Earth in the Attic, just came out from Yale University Press, the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, selected by Louise Gluck. How does that feel?

It feels great, a life well dreamt or a dream well lived. I hope the book is received well, I naturally think its themes of exile and witness to refugees and displaced people in the world are an unusual event in poetry. I hope I was up to the task aesthetically (though I feel good about that with Gluck backing me up, after all she is not received as a socially engaged poet; although I beg to differ). Exiles (as a step up, descendants of the refugee) and, more urgently, the displaced and refugees are world historical individuals, in Hegel’s phrase…a disclaimer: I am not a Hegel specialist: to my mind they define the horrors of the nation-state, which is still a new concept in the world: 40 million displaced people (not counting the homeless and “disenfranchised” citizens of “stable” states) is a number that can not be ignored. These are people who define the other face of the mirror, the dark side that does not reflect us, or so we think.

2. Your son Ziyad was born on March 27th, 2008. What are you thinking about?

Artist Robert Rauschenberg died Monday night at the age of 82. Obituaries can be found all over the place, so instead of adding another, here's a few interesting links that connect Rauschenberg to poetry. If you have more, please post them in the comments section.

In less than a week, one of my favorite teaching artist programs in New York City, The Community Word Project, will turn ten years old. And so will I. Well, sort of. I started teaching with them almost 9 years ago when I was in graduate school and it was my first foray into the world of both second graders, teaching, and the Bronx. It was also my first year in New York, so as you can imagine, my whole world was on overload. I remember my first day, I could barely breathe and I thought, “How is it possible that students, tiny, beautiful, little students, could make me so nervous.” But they did and I was and it was hard. But it got easier, and eventually, it got addicting. I still miss it, although occasionally I still feel like I work with, ahem, second graders. Now, CWP is a whole ten years old. They’d be in fourth grade! They’d be rocking the elementary school with their new kicks and poems about big kids stuff. So, hats off to The Community Word Project and to the amazing work they do. I’m including a bit of information about their work and their benefit next week.

Of the three poems below, guess which one was composed by a student:

Tears

When the male prostitute started to cry,
I knew right away something
unusual was happening. Something I could
not have foretold that morning, when I passed
my toothbrush under water,
before applying the paste, or zippered
up my bluejeans or took the first crisp
bite out of a hot toasted bagel, spread
with cream cheese. I had been
sucking him off, as
usual, and his cock was
wonderful, very hard. He was
barely moving, as I had asked, kneeling and I,
too, on my knees, bent. First I heard the muffled
catch, loud gurrump in the throat I took
for coming. A loud, clucked swallow—I
stopped. No, he said,
keep going—then
gulped, slung low in
the windpipe. My palms touched
floor before I felt the cold
droplet and looked up and he was
crying. He cried,
and cried and would not tell me. What,
I asked him, what? He had said,
before, his name was Todd. What,
Todd, what?—I kept asking,
but he only cried. I told him no matter
what the dreadful thing was,
nothing could be
that bad and not to worry. Then looked
around for my purse, which had
Mace in it—I’ve read
about these guys, who one day
just snap, like a fist punched through
the universe, and suddenly the world
unstarred and awry and who knows
whose neck they’ll wring next. Quietly,
still crying. Gurgling
din. Coursed
polluted streams across the torso. Drone
ribbon of the ages, what, Todd,
what?—I stopped asking.
And a cool shade
of dullness set in, identical
to the dullness before, the clean grey
walls, bristled nonsmell of
carpet, the dullness of even-tuft, sheerness
of sheets, identical as before but for
the low, persistent white caw of his tears.

Executive producers Terrence Malick and Robert Redford turn to poetry in their collaborative venture, Laura Dunn’s documentary, The Unforeseen. The film, which debuted at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, covers Austin, Texas environmental politics via interviews with environmentalists, real estate developers, a vocal local community, and everyone’s favorite ex-governor of Texas, while peppering excerpts of Wendell Berry reading his poem “Santa Clara Valley” throughout. The poem provides a reflective continuity to the film, making sense, at times, of what is a bitter and emotional battle for the area of Barton Springs in Austin, a battle begun in the '70s and continuing through the '90s.

An excerpt from Berry’s poem captures the main arc of the film:

In Robert Altman's seminal film, Nashville, a third-party candidate named Hal Philip Walker is running for president on a ticket known as The Replacement Party. "I'm for doing some replacing," he says of the bureaucracy in Washington.