04/25/99

By Tom Mayo

Poetry

The media blitz surrounding National Poetry Month (the month formerly known as April) has predictably focused on national developments - a busy time.

Taking poetic license with the concept of "month," I mark the beginning of National Poetry Month this year on March 8 with the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry going to Marie Ponsot's fourth book in 41 years, The Bird Catcher (Knopf, 1998). It was worth the wait, each poem showing the results of months and years of burnishing.

April itself saw the award of the Pulitzer Prize to Mark Strand for his collection Blizzard on One. April was also the month that the indefatigable Robert Pinsky was reappointed for an almost unprecedented third year as the nation's poet laureate. Check out his "Favorite Poem Project" - a video and audio archive of more than 1,000 of our fellow citizens reading poems - at www.favoritepoem.org.

Local pros well-versed in the art of poetry

Locally, on April 11 the Writer's Garret sponsored an afternoon of conversation among many of the leaders of Dallas' poetry scene. These are some of the artists who have worked hard to create breathing space for poetry over the last couple of decades (or more), including Robert Trammell (WordSpace's program director and DART poet), Jack Myers (director of Southern Methodist University's Creative Writing program), former Cultural Affairs Commission member Barbara Renaud Gonzalez, Bob McCranie (editor of the online journal Red River Review), Clebo Rainey (founder of the national runner-up Dallas slams), Patty Turner (former owner of Shakespeare Books), two founding members of Ordained in Lyrics (GNO and Camika Spencer) and Joe Ahearn (co-founder of Rancho Loco Press).

The afternoon was a reminder of all the things that poetry is and can be - solitary and social, established and subversive, personal and political. Most of all, though, it demonstrated the insistent and persistent nature of the art whose ancient appeal is that it is literally created out of thin air.

Meeting the Buddha at the ballpark

The event also brought a recent work from Rancho Loco Press to my attention, the most recent collection of 20 poems by Jack Myers, Human Being (1998). This is a profoundly moving exploration of Eastern religious themes, touching briefly upon Islam but centered upon Buddhism (and especially Zen). There are haikulike explorations here ("Limits") and parables galore. Even the longer poems, however, manage to capture the simplicity and convey the moment of insight (satori) of good haiku. I particularly recommend Mr. Myers' interpolations of Zen moments in Western settings, for example his celebration of a son's strikeout at the plate ("The Rules"):

My son's errors at play
are moments of pure air and light.
Isn't that what missing is?
That seems just as lovely and interesting
as getting it right.

These are poems that ably shift their focus and ours from foreground to background, from the imminent to the transcendent, and they do it with humor, humility and passion. Most of all, these are poems I want to come back to again and again.

Beyond Dallas, the Wings Press of San Antonio has added three volumes so far this year to Poesia Tejana, its ongoing series of poetry books and chapbooks by younger Tejana poets. The publisher is Bryce Milligan, who co-edited last year's superb collection of Latina poetry !Floricanto Si! The Poesia Tejana series now consists of Smolt by Nicole Pollentier; Long Story Short by Mary Grace Rodriguez; Cande, te estoy llamando by Celeste Guzman (all in English); and Peace in the Corazon by Victoria Garcia-Zapata. These are impressive, urgent poems that deserve to be read.

And then there are books about poetry. Houstonian Edward Hirsch's How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love With Poetry (Harcourt Brace) may be my favorite, a helpful guide for those who have no intention of becoming poets but want to improve their reading skills. How to Read a Poem . . . and Start a Poetry Circle by Molly Peacock gives us 11 chapters on 11 poems to illustrate ways of reading and talking about poems, bracketed by a couple of chapters on how poems work and a set of instructions on starting a poetry circle. The most scholarly and challenging of these three is A Poet's Guide to Poetry by Mary Kinzie (University of Chicago Press); she directs the Creative Writing program at Northwestern University. This is not a book to read straight through, nor would you want to. It is, however, an excellent guide for anyone seriously interested in poetry.

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

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