BLABLABLACONTENIDOS.COM

This is a messy little love letter for the tremendously loveable BIG BIG MESS READING SERIES in Akron, Ohio. Akron may already be known for its tires and its tireless love of grit and rust and sweat, but the BIG BIG MESS deserves its own corner of the proverbial postcard. This reading series, which is one of the most giddy and eclectic I’ve witnessed, was founded by Nick Sturm, and is presently curated by Alexis Pope and Mike Krutel. It’s a monthly affair, and takes place at Annabell’s Bar & Lounge, 782 West Market Street in downtown Akron.

I’m the sort of person who always feels compelled to scream in a quiet library, or to slap two books together in glee during a particularly enjoyable poetry reading. Both of these activities are not only permissible, but encouraged, at the BIG BIG MESS. Listeners don’t just hear the poems, they feel them, and that’s okay. Furthermore, the BIG BIG MESS has door prizes, ranging from shake weights to hot new poetry collections donated by small presses. The lineup is always top-notch, the drinks are cold, the bar stools are wobbly, and the words bring down the house every time.

—Mary Biddinger

*Throughout Poetry Month 32 Poems will use this space to praise presses, journals, and readings series that bring poetry to us in a special way. Our hope is that we can point new fans in their direction and publicly thank editors and curators for their work. Check in with us again tomorrow for another poet’s recommendation.

↔

Mary Biddinger’s most recent poetry collection is O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Bat City Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, Crab Orchard Review, Forklift, Ohio, Guernica, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and Redivider, among others. She teaches literature and poetry writing at The University of Akron, where she edits Barn Owl Review, the Akron Series in Poetry, and the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics.

32 Poems Magazine

With a quiet confidence Mary Angelino’s “Feeding the Geese” describes a familiar scene of human interaction with the natural world and then transcends that moment with a final stanza that makes me gasp with recognition, bringing to light a fear I had yet to articulate. Far too often poets writing about the natural world fall into the trap of the didactic mother-nature-teaching-us-a-lesson poem. Angelino deftly avoids this trap and makes new her subject, the speaker observing nature while keenly aware of the separate quality that makes humans stand apart from the natural world.

The poem opens with an erasure when the speaker states, “I am nothing to them,” and that, along with the title, sets up the age-old dichotomy of human versus nature, except this isn’t the speaker versus the geese. Instead, the poem explores the modern symbiosis of the two, the speaker bringing a bag of bread to the lake to feed the geese. We are in nature, but we are not in the wilderness. The speaker has come to commune and interact rather than to hunt and conquer, yet the speaker never completely steps into the natural elements. There is a separation that cannot be eliminated. Even the description of how the geese approach, all neck and peck, “as if their bodies were hidden under a table,” places us in a human environment. The idea of feeding the geese remains an artificial construct as the kitchen table hovers metaphorically over the landscape.

In stanzas two and three, the speaker fades from the scene even more as the supply of bread comes to an end and the geese return to the water. It is in these two stanzas that I hear the echoes of Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole,” a poem not memorized but layered into my muscle memory by it having been taught to me by a Yeats enthusiast many years ago. While Yeats describes how the swans all take flight at once and “scatter wheeling in great broken rings,” Angelino describes the geese on the lake creating wakes that are “the spokes of a wheel.” When Yeats depicts the way the swans “drift on the still water,” Angelino’s geese sleep there “wooden tops / the wind has set to spinning.” In both poems one natural element layers on the next, building tension from line to line, even as the speaker remains a silent observer, knowing he/she will never truly be “of” nature, the separation created by the thinking mind too much a chasm to overcome.

It is in the fourth and final stanza of “Feeding the Geese” that the speaker returns full force, noting another human separator in the natural landscape, the bench upon which the speaker sits to observe, the bench that provides comfort and convenience and elevates the speaker, creating a distance from the nature observed. This distance is crucial to creating the force of the last line in the poem, when after having spent a brief interlude with the geese, the lake, and the wind, the speaker contemplates mortality. Rather than falling prey to the “nature lesson” of the cycle of life, the speaker resists, confessing to the wish for a long life but also to “still have [her] mind” when the end of that life nears.

Here is where the poem turns for me. I gravitate toward poetry that explores the human condition and offers me both empathy and wisdom. Angelino has certainly done both, leading by instinct and observation rather than by lecture to this pronouncement of something human and true. That last line lingers and haunts, as I am a woman approaching middle age, with aging parents, one of whom suffers from the loss of short-term memory, and two grandparents who slipped away into dementia before dying. Would I have recognized the brutal honesty and the threat of Angelino’s last line at an earlier age? I doubt it. Did I see this in Yeats’ poem all those years ago? No. But there too is the beauty of poetry. It will be there, always, waiting for the reader to catch up and take what it has to give.

—Sandy Longhorn

Sandy Longhorn is the author of Blood Almanac (Anhinga Press). New poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, North American Review, Waccamaw, and elsewhere.  Longhorn teaches at Pulaski Technical College, runs the Big Rock Reading Series, is an Arkansas Arts Council fellow, and blogs at Myself the only Kangaroo among the Beauty.

32 Poems Magazine

Trouble forces her to hide in a wagon, which leads to a misunderstanding that leaves her married. But a near death experience to remind her who she is.

Suite101 Articles

A white girl raised by the Flathead Indians is rescued several times by Wade Sawyer in Mary Connealy's third book in the Montana Marriage Trilogy.

Suite101 Articles

On the 32 Poems Facebook page, we discussed our favorite poems. Julie Brooks Barbour took us up on our offer to write about one of her favorite poems. What follows is a brief essay on “Singapore” by Mary Oliver.

Singapore

In Singapore, in the airport,
a darkness was ripped from my eyes.
In the women’s restroom, one compartment stood open.
A woman knelt there, washing something
     in the white bowl.

Disgust argued in my stomach
and I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket.

A poem should always have birds in it.
Kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings.
Rivers are pleasant, and of course trees.
A waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain
     rising and falling.
A person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.

When the woman turned I could not answer her face.
Her beauty and her embarrassment struggled together, and
     neither could win.
She smiled and I smiled. What kind of nonsense is this?
Everybody needs a job.

Yes, a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem.
But first we must watch her as she stares down at her labor,
     which is dull enough.
She is washing the tops of the airport ashtrays, as big as
     hubcaps, with a blue rag.
Her small hands turn the metal, scrubbing and rinsing.
She does not work slowly, nor quickly, but like a river.
Her dark hair is like the wing of a bird.

I don’t doubt for a moment that she loves her life.
And I want her to rise up from the crust and the slop
     and fly down to the river.
This probably won’t happen.
But maybe it will.
If the world were only pain and logic, who would want it?

Of course, it isn’t.
Neither do I mean anything miraculous, but only
the light that can shine out of a life. I mean
the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth,
the way her smile was only for my sake; I mean
the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds.

Copyright @ 1990 by Mary Oliver. First published in House of Light, Beacon Press. Reprinted in New and Selected Poems, Volume One, Beacon Press.

This poem was posted to my office door during the years I worked as Staff Support for a university composition program, supporting my husband through graduate school. At that time, graduate students and professors surrounded me, and many saw me as a secretary, nothing more. Like anyone else, I hoped I would one day arrive where I wanted to be and that this was simply a stopping place. I was always a grad student’s wife, uncertain about my place in the world.

What I love about this poem is its wide social significance. I didn’t post it on my door to remind others that my job didn’t define me. It was a reminder to not judge others by the jobs they perform. My position, though it may have paid more, did not make me a better person than a custodian or groundskeeper. This poem is a lesson in humility: though the work of another person may disgust her, the speaker realizes that she is no better than the woman because she can flee (“I felt, in my pocket, for my ticket”). The janitor’s smile is only for the speaker’s sake; her hair becomes as beautiful as the wing of a bird because she is human, not because she cleans toilets. The “darkness” that is “ripped” from the speaker’s eyes is the darkness associated with dirtiness, and, more possibly, class distinctions.

Though the title is important in defining place and how we, as readers, might visualize the woman in the poem, I think that is where its significance ends. Since the woman we meet through the speaker never utters a word, acting as a silent movie character, she could very well be any woman cleaning any airport anywhere in the world. What is most significant is the way in which the speaker argues against how the larger culture has taught her to treat a janitor or anyone working a job that would make her cringe, and how she accepts this woman as part of the world, as a human among humans, in the only way she knows how: through a poem.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine

1. Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls by Erika Meitner. One of the most beautifully designed books of the year, this collection is a brilliant foray into the nature of transgression and desire. These poems break the rules while delivering advice, and embody a number of perspectives and interpretations of “vigilance.”

2. Faulkner’s Rosary by Sarah Vap. Reading this book is a completely transformational experience. You’ll never think of the body the same way again. This book is a must-read for anyone who aspires to convey personal experience in a way that rivets readers of all backgrounds. Vap’s use of the line is unparalleled in contemporary poetry, in my opinion.

3. The Luckless Age by Steve Kistulentz. Spending a Friday evening at home with this collection will make you feel as if you’ve had the wildest night of your life. These poems are riotous and poignant, ecstatic and wise. An excellent book for course adoption—my students were floored by these poems (in a very good way).

4. Say So by Dora Malech. This collection reminds us that poetry is made of music, and these poems make music of things both ordinary and extraordinary. I especially admire the way Malech’s poems create their own sense of form and order, and then completely ransack that sense of form and order, right before our eyes.

5. American Busboy by Matthew Guenette. I am cheating here because this book is forthcoming (but available for pre-order) and because my press is publishing it, but I can’t write a list of five without including American Busboy. This is an epic collection just begging to be made into a rock opera—one with heroic busboys, surly customers, tyrannical management, and an enduring commentary on the nature of sweat and struggle in contemporary America.

BIO: Mary Biddinger is the author of three poetry collections: Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), the chapbook Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), and O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2012), and co-editor of one volume of criticism: The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). She teaches at The University of Akron, and edits Barn Owl Review and the Akron Series in Poetry. She is the director of the NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in creative writing program. Her website and her blog.

Poetry Blog of 32 Poems Magazine