"American Spring Song" by Sherwood Anderson

American Spring Song

By Sherwood Anderson

In the spring, when the winds blew and farmers were plowing fields,
It came into my mind to be glad because of my brutality.

Along a street I went and over a bridge.
I went through many streets in my city and over many bridges.
Men and women I struck with my fists, and my hands began to
     bleed.

Under a bridge I crawled, and stood trembling with joy
At the river’s edge.
Because it was spring and soft sunlight came through the cracks
     of the bridge,
I tried to understand myself.

Out of the mud at the river’s edge I molded myself a god –
A grotesque little god with a twisted face,
A god for myself and my men.

You see now, brother, how it was.

I was a man with clothes made by a Jewish tailor;
Cunningly wrought clothes, made for a nameless one.
I wore a white collar and someone had given me a jeweled pin
To wear at my throat.
That amused and hurt me too.

No one knew that I knelt in the mud beneath the bridge
In the city of Chicago.

You see I am whispering my secret to you.

I want you to believe in my insanity and to understand that I love
     God –
That’s what I want.

And then, you see, it was spring,
And the soft sunlight came through the cracks of the bridge.
I had been long alone in a strange place where no gods came.

Creep, men, and kiss the twisted face of my mud god.
I’ll not hit you with my bleeding fists –
I’m a twisted God myself.

It is spring and love has come to me.
Love has come to me and to my men.


American Spring Song, by Sherwood Anderson. Public Domain



Portrait of Sherwood Anderson

by Carl Van Vechten (1933)

Sherwood Anderson

(September 13, 1876 – March 8, 1941)

Sherwood Anderson was a writer best known for his short stories, most notably the collection Winesburg, Ohio, which he began writing in 1919. Critics trace his influence on several American authors including Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck. In fact, it was through his influence that first books of both Faulkner and Hemingway were published.

A native of Ohio, Anderson forever endeared himself to the Arts community when, on Nov. 28, 1912, he "left business for literature," simply walking out of his office as president of the Anderson Manufacturing Co. in Elyria, Ohio, not only giving up a dream of becoming rich in American business, but also abandoning his responsibilities as a middle-class citizen, including a wife and three small children.

He and by-then his third wife, Elizabeth Prall, moved to New Orleans in 1924, settling briefly into the historic Pontalba Apartments adjoining Jackson Square. He quickly became part of New Orleans's vibrant literary and artistic scene, drinking with the likes of writers, William Faulkner, Lyle Saxon, Hamilton Basso, and artists William Spratling, Caroline Durieux and Ellsworth Woodward. Visitors like John Dos Passos, Carl Sandburg and Anita Loos dropped in now and then. Faulkner lived with Spratling for a time, and together they wrote and published Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles in 1926. Anderson wrote of Faulkner in his short story A Meeting South.

According to writers Robert Phelps and Peter Deane in their tome, The Literary Life: A Scrapbook Almanac of the Anglo-American Literary Scene from 1900 to 1950, Sherwood Anderson was responsible for encouraging Faulkner to complete his first novel in 1925:

“En route to Europe for the first time, Willliam Faulkner stops over in New Orleans, meets Sherwood Anderson, and lingers for six months, during which he completes his first novel, Soldier’s Pay. A little later, reportedly in gratitude for not having been asked to read the manuscript, Anderson recommends it to his own publisher.”

During this period, Sherwood Anderson wrote Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925). F. Scott Fitzgerald praised Many Marriages, saying it was Anderson’s finest work. Dark Laughter, a novel rooted in his New Orleans experience and Anderson's only best-seller, was famously satirized by Ernest Hemingway in his novel The Torrents of Spring.

The poem “American Spring Song” was published in 1918 in a collection of his poetry, Mid-American Chants.

Sherwood Anderson died of peritonitis on a trip to Panama when a broken toothpick perforated his intestines, aged 64. He was buried at Round Hill Cemetery in Marion, Virginia. His epitaph reads, "Life Not Death is the Great Adventure".

A detailed account of his life can be found here.

(Portrait of Sherwood Anderson by Carl Van Vechten (1933) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection, reproduction number LOT 12735, no. 52.)

Nature Poems in a Post-Natural Age

Poet Gary Snyder thinks the landscape of contemporary poetry should include wildflowers . . . and highway fast food joints.


By John Felstiner

Reprinted with permission

Poetry Media Services

Gary Snyder. Photo by Leon Borensztei.

One of the original voices of the Beat Generation, Gary Snyder has been publishing poems for over 50 years. In addition to writing poems, Snyder has had a firm commitment to sustainability, a concern that is echoed in both his poems and essays.

John Felstiner: Do you remember some moment in your recent or remote past when you got the connection between poetry and environmental consciousness, where you felt it as a kind of absolute truth?

Gary Snyder: I grew up with it. Beginning when I was four years old, five years old, in the countryside, in a wooded landscape north of Seattle, back in the days when kids weren’t programmed. We just ran loose around the family dairy farm and went through the gap in the fence and right back into the woods. I felt as welcome and as much at home in the forest, second-growth forest growing back, as I did anyplace else, and I was comforted by it. I was always easy being alone. And if I went with a friend, that was fine too.

JF: How would one distinguish an environmental poem from what is sometimes called an ecological poem?

GS: Look at the words. “Environment” means the surroundings. The surroundings can include an oil refinery, can include all of Los Angeles and the I-5 strip. That’s the environment too, whatever surrounds us.

JF: So there’s an “us” in “environment.”

GS: Everything surrounds everything else. Yes. What is “ecological”? Etymologically, the "household of nature" is what's being called up. “Ecological” refers to the systems of biological nature, which include energy, and mineral and chemical transformations and pathways. “The environment” is used more commonly to also include human and technological productions. And it’s not an absolute, hard and fast separation. . . .

JF: Have you written poems that could be qualified as one way or the other, or as both together—environmental and ecological?

GS: The best example is in this little book right here, Danger on Peaks.
“In the Santa Clarita Valley”: That is the first valley north of the San Fernando Valley on Interstate 5. There’s a little river there, and it has become almost entirely suburban development now. Here's the poem:

Like skinny wildweed flowers sticking up

hexagonal “Denny’s” sign
starry “Carl’s”
loopy “McDonald’s”
eight-petaled yellow “Shell”
blue-and-white “Mobil” with a big red “O”

growing in the asphalt riparian zone
by the soft roar of the flow
of Interstate 5.

This is playing with the possibility that we might look at the human, physical, made environment as if it were natural environment.

JF: So we move from “Mobil” into a “riparian zone.”

GS: Yeah.

JF: And hear that word “flow” for the highway.

GS: Right, it’s ironic. I comment when I read this in meetings, that this is to help prepare us for a post-natural age. For writing nature poems in a post-natural age.

JF: We were speaking of (William Carlos) Williams’ “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” In 1950 or so he took his Western tour, and he came to Reed, where you were with your poet friends. Is there anything specific you remember about that event?

GS: What stayed with me was how he said ultimately the poet, the artist, brings to society and to the world "conviviality.” That surprised me and stayed with me: conviviality. He said art is about conviviality. I saw instantly that this goes past the idea of the solitary, romantic, lonely artist suffering for his art, which I never trusted. And the acknowledgment that artists have a role in society, which is to contribute to the community — to the heart of the community.
Take Williams’ statement that people “die for lack of what is found there,” I think this means lack of open-heartedness, lack of sweetness and tenderness to each other. But then a little later I saw that meaning also as ecological, that openness not just for the human community but for the natural community; it’s for our immediate neighborhood of all the other species, all of us passing through time. I get angered when the bears eat my apples right off the tree. But I can say well, okay, they got to them first; they must have enjoyed them.

John Felstiner’s translations and critical work have been widely published and awarded. He teaches at Stanford. John's newest book, So Much Depends, dealing with poetry and environmental urgency, will be published by Yale University Press in 2008.
© 2007 by John Felstiner. All rights reserved.
Distributed by the Poetry Foundation at www.poetryfoundation.org.

Creating Fresh Imagery

Here’s an exercise I use in my creative writing classes that I’ve found to be effective for creating very unique, fresh and powerful images:

Draw a line down the center of a piece of notebook paper. On the left side of the page, list tangible, concrete nouns: brick, shovel, river, mountain, etc....

On the right side of the page, list intangible nouns: trouble, love, sorrow, desire...

(Just flip open the dictionary if your mind gets stuck)

Now combine the tangibles with the intangibles in a phrase like this: “a shovel full of sorrow,” or “a river of trouble.” Let yourself get carried away with this, and you will come up with some very powerful images.

Here’s an example I’ve created for illustrative purposes:

TANGIBLE               INTANGIBLE
1. Pebble                    Anger
2. River                      Sorrow
3. Mountain                Grief
4. Street                     Fear
5. knife                       Happiness
6. Shoe                      Greed
7. Spoon                    Jealousy
8. Chalice                   Hate
9. Thorn                     Loathing
10. Mirror                  Joy
11. Bus                      Glee
12. Fist                      Merriment
13. Pothole                Trouble
14. Weeds                 Woe
15. Lake                    Guilt
16. House                  Wisdom
17. Train                    Intelligence
18. Boat                    Despair
19. Shovel                 Sensitivity
20. Cup                     Regret
21. Gourd                  Loss
22. Missile                 Anguish
23. Silo                      Insanity
24. Mouthful              Foolishness
25. Beach                  Depression

Now just start playing with it ...

A pothole of depression...a train of trouble...a beach of sorrow... a busload of hate...a shovel of regret...(pricked by) the thorn of jealousy...a spoonful of greed....weeds of regret... (storing) a silo of anger... a lake of grief...a chalice of sorrow... a cup of joy... a fist of wisdom... shoes of glee... a mirror of loathing...a street of woe...a cup of fear ... a river of insanity... a pothole of wisdom... a river of sorrow... a cup of depression... a mountain of woe... a missile of insanity... a house of (pick it)... a pebble of happiness.... a pothole of happiness.... a river of despair... a mountain of anguish ... (greeted by) a fist of happiness.... a mouthful of foolishness.... a mouthful of anger... a silo of guilt...

You can be the judge, but personally, I’ve identified several intriguing combinations that I think make for creative images.

Have fun.

Noche de Cita: A poem by Donald G. Redman

Noche de Cita
(Date Night)
by Donald G. Redman

Corona in yellow neon
illuminates the window
next to our corner table,
bathing us in a warm glow.

I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.
I weave my arm through the clutter
of plates and bottles and glasses
and grab your hand like a lecher.

I give you a tawdry wink
but you are too gracious to mock.
You smile conspiratorially
and turn to read the cactus clock.

I crave your neck in that moment,
with lemons and blue agave
and the saltiness of your flesh;
your intoxicating bouquet.

Neon peppers like red lips
peck the yellow wall behind you
and I think of Klimt’s “The Kiss”
and of making love to you.

Our waitress returns, busing our
plates littered with taco debris,
diced tomatoes, lettuce, grains of
Spanish rice and guacamole.

She asks if we want something else.
“A margarita, por favor.”
She turns to leave but you stop her,
telling her, “No más. No more.”

We’ve had enough; it’s time to leave.
You’re right, of course, we should go
but I want to stay here and keep
drinking you and José Cuervo.

Your lips part for the last sip
of plum-red sangria wine.
You wink and whisper the kids aren’t
home and we may still have time.

We stroll out like young lovers,
your hand inside mine like a glove
and I’m blue with happiness.
I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.


Copyright 2011 Donald G. Redman All Rights Reserved. Photo illustration by Donald G. Redman

Thinking in Images

by Donald G. Redman

We tend to think of images as objects seen, but the term also applies to our other senses: sounds, texture, odors and taste. Of the three genres that interest me most (poetry, fiction, playwriting) it is poetry that is most dependent upon images for impact. Indeed, sense perception is crucial for the poet and plays a vitally important role in the poetic creative process, more so than any other textual form of art.

All good writers are keen observers of their environs, but poets in particular seem to be more in tune with the senses and possess the ability to see, hear, feel, smell and taste more than the average person. While most of us usually gloss over our surroundings, poets are able to harvest powerful images from the mundane, be they spider webs; a leaf-clogged gutter; a dead squirrel in the middle of the street; arthritic hands; or a store display of red slippers:

Red Slippers
By Amy Lowell

Red slippers in a shop-window; and outside in the street, flaws of gray, windy sleet!

Behind the polished glass the slippers hang in long threads of red, festooning from the ceiling like stalactites of blood, flooding the eyes of the passers-by with dripping color, jamming their crimson reflections against the windows of cabs and tram-cars, screaming their claret and salmon into the teeth of the sleet, plopping their little round maroon lights upon the tops of umbrellas.

The row of white, sparkling shop-front is gashed and bleeding, it bleeds red slippers. They spout under the electric light, fluid and fluctuating, a hot rain – and freeze again to red slippers, myriadly multiplied in the mirror side of the window.
They balance upon arched insteps like springing bridges of crimson lacquer; they swing up over curved heels like whirling tanagers sucked in a wind-pocket; they flatten out, heelless, like July ponds, flared and burnished by red rockets.
Snap, snap, they are cracker sparks of scarlet in the white monotonous block of shops.
They plunge the clangor of billions of vermillion trumpets into the crowd outside, and echo in faint rose over the pavement.

People hurry by, for these are only shoes, and in a window farther down is a big lotus bud of cardboard, whose petals open every few minutes and reveal a wax doll, with staring bead eyes and flaxen hair, lolling awkwardly in its flower chair.
One has often seen shoes, but whoever saw a cardboard lotus bud before?

The flaws of gray, windy sleet beat on the shop-window where there are only red slippers.

Lowell’s use of imagery is brilliant. Aside from the obvious visual contrast of red against gray, Lowell also uses sound imagery in very effective ways: “dripping,” “screaming,” “plopping,” “Snap, snap,” “cracker sparks,” “clangor” “trumpets,” “echo,” and the sound of “windy sleet” beating against the shop window.

Maxwell Bodenheim finds poetry on the rear balconies of an apartment complex. Take a quick moment to read Bodenheim’s “The Rear-Porches Of An Apartment-Building,” found here.

Again, a mundane scene, this one in the courtyard of an apartment complex, is described in vivid detail with color: yellow pears, lavender-white eyes, a red fan; sound: the girl’s singing, pears being peeled, and the unstated sounds of the urban setting beyond the confines of the apartment building; and taste: cakes and pears.

In the hands of a skillful poet, art exists in the ordinary. Alice Corbin’s “Sand Painting” captures a full day, from dawn to night, with exquisite imagery:

Sand Paintings
By Alice Corbin

The dawn breeze
Loosens the leaves
Of the trees;
The wide sky quivers
With awakened birds.

Two blue runners
Come from the east;
One has a scarf of silver,
One flings pine-boughs
Across the sky.

Noon-day stretched
In gigantic slumber –
Red copper cliffs
Rigid in sunlight.

An old man stoops
For a forgotten fagot –
Forehead of bronze
Between white locks
Bound with a rag of scarlet.

Where one door stands open,
The female moon
Beckons to darkness
And disappears.

I draw your attention to Corbin’s poem to highlight an important rule writers must always keep in mind– avoid clichés and tired phrases. Here, instead of writing “leaves rustled in the wind,” or “wind-blown leaves,” Corbin writes that the breeze has loosened the leaves. She also avoids writing about squawking birds or birds chirping by phrasing it as the sky quivering “with awakened birds.” Her description of the setting sun is also brilliantly detailed as an old man with:
“Forehead of bronze
Between white locks
Bound with a rag of scarlet.”

What beautiful imagery!

Charles Bukowski avoids the cliché in his poem, “The Crunch,” by brilliantly converting the ubiquitous “faceless strangers” into “strangers with faces like the backs of thumb tacks.”

For obvious reasons sight imagery is the tool most frequently employed by poets, but sound imagery can be equally effective in the development of a poem. Sound, or the imagined sound, in Amy Lowell’s “Red Slippers” was vital to creating an image of what certainly cannot be described as “quiet desperation,” but rather the internal rancor of ignored beauty.

Carl Sandburg uses the sound of a boat’s foghorn to great effect to describe the feeling of being lost.

Lost
By Carl Sandberg

Desolate and lone
All night long on the lake
Where the fog trails and mist creeps,
The whistle of a boat
Calls and cries unendingly,
Like some lost child
In tears and trouble
Hunting the harbor’s breast
And the harbor’s eyes.

In using sounds, poets have to be much more creative than using broad generalities. The roar of the ocean, the roar of traffic, the rustling of leaves ... they’re exhausted phrases that mean very little to the reader. Instead, we must work harder to isolate the sounds and convey them in ways that are new and meaningful.

But what if our specific poem is indeed inspired by the sound of waves crashing against rocks or the pitter-patter of rainfall? I can only suggest that you keep it in the initial drafts and work with it until you find a new twist of a phrase or a better metaphor or simile.

In her poem “Fallen,” Alice Corbin uniquely describes the sound of an imagined wave washing over the body of a dying soldier: “The tide passed, and the waves came and whispered about his ankles.” Describing the faint sound of a dying wave rolling onto the beach – a sound I’m sure we all know so well – to express it as a whisper is simply brilliant.

Sights and sounds are on full display in Amy Lowell’s “1777 I. The Trumpet-Vine Arbour, II. The City of Falling Leaves”  (read it here).While the subject of the “Trumpet-Vine” may appear old fashioned – a tribute to the American Revolution – Lowell’s use of sound and color is nevertheless worthy of study. “The City of Falling Leaves” is simply gorgeous – a painting in words.

The remaining senses – touch, smell and taste – are even harder to express than sound, but deserve our consideration and effort. The imagery can be created from small observations like the feel of grains of salt spilled on the table; the scent of a child who has been playing outside; the smell and taste of a strawberry margarita with a freshly squeezed lime; the scent of pine or the tackiness of pinesap.

Lola Ridge’s “Iron Wine” assaults our senses of sight, smell and taste.

Iron Wine
By Lola Ridge

The ore in the crucible is pungent, smelling like acrid wine,
It is dusky red, like the ebb of poppies,
And purple, like the blood of elderberries.
Surely it is a strong wine - juice distilled of the fierce iron.
I am drunk of its fumes.
I feel its fiery flux
Diffusing, permeating,
Working some strange alchemy…
So that I turn aside from the goodly board,
So that I look askance upon the common cup,
And from the mouths of crucibles
Suck forth the acrid sap.

Accomplished poets rely on chance observations, but novice poets like me have to make it a habit to notice the sounds, odors, textures and sights around me, and to craft new ways to describe them that will be acknowledged by the reader.

Nicholson Baker Talks Poetry

Can a novel capture contemporary poetry’s (dour, curmudgeonly) zeitgeist?

Nicholson Baker interviewed by Jesse Nathan
Poetry Media Services

Paul Chowder—the protagonist of Baker’s latest novel, The Anthologist—is a minor poet. He writes forgettable verse. He is deeply enamored of rhyme and meter. He is suspicious of the waves of free verse that have flooded the last one hundred years of literary history.
The novel that unfolds centers on Chowder’s quest to finish a long-overdue introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry he’s editing.
I called Nick at his home in Maine to have a conversation about all this. What follows is what followed.

Jesse Nathan: Why a novel?

Nicholson Baker: Because some lines of poetry make me happy. How do you capture that pleasure? A novel lets you write sloppily about the things you love. You can be as selective as you want to. It’s very freeing, and it’s truer to the way poems live in the mind.

JN: Poetry is the art form you can carry in your head, and you can give it to somebody by opening your mouth and reciting, or you can say a line aloud to yourself in an empty hayloft. You can’t do that with any other art form.

NB: It’s true. You can’t carry around a Turner landscape and recite bits of it. You can hum a Brahms piano piece, but it isn’t the same.

JN: Paul Chowder says there’s too much poetry being written.

NB: It’s a feeling of simple unmanageability. So many poems every year. And the fearful onslaught of this much production, combined with the knowledge that you can’t possibly know where to find the gems, can be overwhelming. You need to find a rock and sit still for a bit.

JN: Paul Chowder is alarmingly normal. Is he too normal to be a great poet?

NB: I think that’s his deep fear. And it’s certainly—well, how much to say?—it has certainly been a worry of my own. He thinks that to be a great poet, you have to have a life marred by some kind of great . . .

JN: Pain?

NB: Pain, yes. But of course he’s wrong. It’s a fallacy. Even if he were in terrible pain, it wouldn’t guarantee that he had what it took to be a great poet.

JN: Why does so much American verse sound like it’s been translated from another language?

NB: Maybe it’s that certain poems are looking for some identifying plumage in order to say, “I’m a poem. I may be read aloud and then you won’t be able to see any of the oddities of my layout, but still I am a poem, I am speaking to you with a recognizably translated-sounding accent.” It’s kind of what happened to Poe. If you read “The Bells” or “The Raven,” I mean, it’s just a chocolate-covered cherry of lyricism, it’s so sweet. And then people like Mallarmé seized on those poems and translated them into beautiful pure French prose, and that de-rhymed prose fed back into American Modernist poetry. I think it was Alice Corbin Henderson in Poetry, way back when, who first wrote about that phenomenon: Poe in French translation fueled Modernism in English.

JN: Has poetry been important to your novel-writing?

NB: Yes, poetry taught me to write prose. I don’t have the talent to be a poet, and that’s a disappointment, of course, but there are other ways to put truths down on the page. So I felt that I could recover from the shock.

JN: Paul Chowder meditates on Marinetti, the Italian poet and the father of Futurism, and he describes the way Marinetti’s writing made a fetish of destruction, and how it emphasized the need for hardness and coldness and machinelike attitudes toward everything.

NB: Right, and this in turn so obviously overstimulated people like Ezra Pound and Benito Mussolini—and I’m sure you can take it too far almost instantly, because there are a lot of other reasons why huge, horrifying political movements arise, but at the very beginning there’s Marinetti.

JN: Paul very directly traces Marinetti’s ideas to the rise of fascism.

NB: And in some ways the question about the violent beginnings of Modernism is answered directly, because during the war Ezra Pound went even further off the deep end than Marinetti ever had.

JN: What is the question at the beginning of Modernism?

NB: What’s the energy that motivates us? Is it the energy to make new, or is it simply the desire to break? If it’s just to break, if it’s just hostility, then it doesn’t get you very far. And in Marinetti and Pound there’s an awful lot of hostility, and a bossiness, of insisting that your way is the right way. A really good poem makes its case without making its case. It doesn’t insist that its way is the only way. That’s what’s so beautiful about “The Fish,” by Elizabeth Bishop. She just bends over the fish and looks it in the eye and then lets it go. Her description of what happened is just one description. She’s not insisting on something big. She’s not a manifesto writer. She’s a letter writer. Those are the two antipodes of Modernism, I think: manifestoes versus letters. A letter is anchored in a single day and is to a particular person and is not attempting to change anything.

Jesse Nathan is an associate editor at McSweeney’s Publishing in San Francisco, managing editor of the Best American Nonrequired Reading, and a contributing editor at theRumpus.net. His writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, Adbusters, and elsewhere. This article first appeared at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/.

Distributed by the Poetry Foundation.

Noche de Cita – a poem under construction

These are just my rough notes. I'm still adding to them. I intend to deconstruct and recononstruct in a more formalized poetic format.


Noche de Cita
(Date Night)
I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.
We’re nestled in the corner of the restaurante, sitting on straight back chairs flanking a small table set for two. Jalapeño peppers in green neon flicker against the ochre yellow wall behind you.
I sweep the beer bottles aside and reach across the table for your hand and give a tawdry wink. I think I’m being sexy. You are too gracious to laugh. Luscious lips form a knowing smile and you lower your gaze like an embarrassed schoolgirl.
Someone enters the restaurant and you lift your head to see if it’s someone we know.
I crave your regal neck in that moment. I imagine the faintly salty taste of your flesh with lemon and tequila. I am filled with agave and desire.
Our waitress returns and I lean back and finish my beer while she buses our table, removing plates smeared with red salsa and guacamole and littered with taco shards and lettuce and diced tomatoes and shredded yellow cheese.
She asks if I want something else. Dessert perhaps?
“Dos cervezas más,” I say, winking.
You cancel the order, saying we’ve had enough. You’re right, of course, but I want to stay where I am, bathed in the light of green neon jalapeños and red chili peppers, with cervezas and tequila coursing through my blood. I plead like a child resisting bedtime. You clasp my hand and look deeply into my eyes and wink.
I’ve been drinking and I’m in love.

Copyright 2011 Donald G. Redman All Rights Reserved