Category Poetry

Post-election, I seem to have been keeping Walt Whitman’s “Complete Poems” close at hand, an old thick paperback, quintessentially dog-eared, the binding now so flaccid that it lies primly flat against my chest on this late fall day as I type these words.

I’m in southern California for my sister’s memorial weekend, an otherwise somber affair leavened both by the prospect of gathering in solidarity with a good part of my nuclear clan and its various affiliates, and by the region living up to its reputation as it unfurls yet another 78-degree day of balmy sunshine right on the cusp of winter.

If the word “exuberant” hadn’t been coined when it was (early 1500s, from the ancient Latin describing an overflowing milk supply from a cow or goat), someone would surely have had to come up with a version of it to describe Whitman’s poetry during his profuse creative period in the latter half of the 19th century.

It’s...

A rarity here, I know, but I’m none too sure I can say much more about this poem that isn’t stark raving obvious and powerful already in its scorching, emphatic admonition to just get the hell out of the way of the life you have lived and come to rest in it. (But that doesn’t mean I won’t try…)

But…wow!

Actually, Dorianne Laux (pronounced “Low”) starts with a “Pow!” in her first two-word declarative sentence that runs us pretty much head-first into the poem’s meaning, message and takeaway: “Regret nothing.”

She doesn’t plunk an exclamation point on the end of it because she doesn’t have to. The line’s brevity and conviction speak for themselves, as both first and last words on a timeless human conundrum.

Any given particularities of regret pale in comparison to just how universally it curls its knobby gnarled fingers around that hollow tree at the base of our gut.

But that’s just the beginning of this comp...

The relatively raging success that Billy Collins has enjoyed as a poet has not come without detractors who decry his free-flowing use of straightforward language and thematic material. This approach makes his poems generally easy to comprehend and, not unimportantly for him and his publishers, huge sellers—at least in comparison to most poetry that has always been the poor stepchild of the literary world.

The now 83-year-old Collins has published 18 volumes of poetry since his 1977 debut volume. The first half-dozen or so went the usual small or university press route that sold a few hundred, maybe up to a (blockbuster!) few thousand volumes and netted him six cents in his bank account. (O.K., it may have been $600, but you get the point…)

And then, a kind of literary/commercial magic happened...

                     “MOMMY!”

               By Andrew Hidas

The tiniest shortfall of a tiny hand,
merrily reaching for safety poolside—
and missing.

Fateful collision of lip and cement,
the gash gushing precious blood
staining red the waterwings designed
to forestall catastrophe.

Flurry of activity, lifeguards rushing,
the ice they bring serving as balm
for body and soul, halfway to the ER
his babble already resuming the
incessant joyful grrrrr of
trucks and dinosaurs.

Five hours later, exhausted and
asleep on his mother’s chest,
darkness abiding, the team finally assembles,
doctor, nurses, interns, respiratory therapist,
eight persons forming a semi-circle
of solemn duty.

The shake and tug to coax him awake,
grasped by multiple hands descending,
his sudden panic beyond all soothing,
needle in the right leg, needle in the left,
“MOMMY!” comes the deep desperate
wail to she who is dear...

The world will be what it will be for human beings—never static, always a hot churning mixture of hope and despair, beauty and carnage, good works and evil deeds. Some eras, though, seem perched on a particularly thin knife’s edge, the odds of falling into a hellish pit rather than a featherbed being higher than normal. Signs seem pretty strong we are in such an era today.

Given the deep and angry divisions currently confronting not only our country but the larger world,, we’d be fools not to worry for its future. We’d also, of course, be fools to worry all the time, to let that worry diminish us, see us give in to disconsolation and despair.

But that is its own fine point at a knife’s edge, isn’t it? Finding room in ourselves to be both sober and carefree, attentive and dreamy, worried and hopeful. Burying our head into neither the warm sands of boundless optimism nor the cold dungeons of eternal gloom.