Millenium Park July 16 2005

 

 

 

 

 

Tornado

Like everybody else, I've been watching the news from Joplin about the tornado that hit there. My hopes and prayers go out to those folks. I know the kind of fear that takes hold of you when a tornado appears.

Years ago, we were living in Charleston, Il, when a tornado hit the southeast edge of town. It set down near where we were living. Here's a poem I wrote about the time before the tornado and the time just after.


My Daughter Lillian is Outside Playing

In the quiet space of the dining room
My wife and I lay out the place settings

The forks beside the Wedgwood plates
The spoons and knives in their places.

A napkin in her hand, she pauses
And tells me again of how her mother

Would starch and iron the squares of cotton
Wash the plates by hand and again by machine.

I smile, nod my head and turn to the window
See the roof next door lift, shingles

Exploding like scattered sparrows, and there
It is—the howl of the locomotive wind

And then a pounding at the glass door
And a screaming that will not stop.

Kate and Anthony and Anna and David and John visit Luciana and Lillian and Linda and John

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poetry I Really Really Like: A MANIFESTO

Let me first say that there are poets and poems I really really like.

Here's a short list of poets who immediately and without prompting come to mind:

Whitman, Robert Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Robert Frost, Ai, Wisława Szymborska, Homer, Francois Villon, Tadeusz Rozewicz, Elizabeth Bishop, Milosz, Zbigniew Herbert (we share a first name!), Auden, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, Karl Shapiro, Philip Levine, Sharon Olds, Allen Ginsberg, Eavan Boland, Donald Hall, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Most of the poets on the list are dead, and the ones that aren't are getting along.

I'm not sure what that means except maybe it takes a while to figure out who you really like and who you really don't like. Poets and poems grow on you, or maybe you grow into them.

I've got an essay online about my relationship to the poetry of Emily Dickinson that talks about that. When I was a student I thought that what she was trying to tell me through her poems was pretty miserable, useless. I said, in fact, "They should feed this stuff [her poems] to the cows." I don't feel that way about her anymore. In fact, she's in the list above. Here's the link that will take you to my essay about what changed my mind. It's listed under essays in the menu on the left of the screen that will come up. Also, there's a poem there called "Midnight" about what I thought about her when I was a student: http://www.eiu.edu/~agora/May05/Guzall.htm

I've been thinking about and reading the poets in the above list for a while and I can say without equivocation that I really really like them.

I think that one of the other things my list of poets says about my taste in poetry is that I like serious poets, poets who tend to take a more or less gloomy view of things, see the dark side, the Darth Vader side of things.

So what's Whitman doing on the list?

Well, he's got that dark side too. It's there with his sunny side. He's a man who knows about the blues. You get this in a lot of his poems, but one I like a lot is one that's not read much. It's buried in the half a thousand pages that make up the later editions of Leaves of Grass. It's a poem called "This Compost." In it, Whitman talks about the wind that rises from the "sour dead" and licks his naked skin.

Yeah, Whitman has his gloomy side.

I like poets who talk about everyday things too, tools and hammers, car parts, branches and limbs of trees, the way a head turns when a person feels too much sun on the back of his neck.

I used to teach poetry writing, and I was always telling students to make sure that their poems had everyday things in them, things like hands and arms, feet and lips in them. I like poems that are crisp in that way. John Milton didn't make my list, but he was a guy who knew something about feet. You read Paradise Lost, and you hear him talk over and over about the sound feet make when they step on grass or what it's like to step on something you're not used to stepping on.

Someone asked me recently how I know what is good poetry and what isn't. There is the long story of what is good and the short story of what is good. The long story involves criteria and personal biography, the short story involves a simple statement. I'll give you the short story. What I feel is "good" is what touches me. All of the poets I mentioned above touched me. And that's why I read them and continue to read them.

This is getting too long so I'll just mention one other thing about the poets I like. I don't know if all of them are like this, but enough of them are so I'll mention it here. They write long sentences. I like the rhythm that you get when a sentence goes on and on and on, and you don't know when it will end but you're sure it will, and you're sure also that when you do get to the ending you'll feel exhausted but happy.

Whitman writes sentences like that, and Frost and Ai do too. Not always but enough of the time.

I'm sure that there are other things that make me like the poems I like (a sense of a personal "I" is one), but I think I'll save that for some other time.



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This piece originally appeared in a blog called Poetry Worth Reading that my friend and terrific poet Marty Williams did. Here's a link to it: Click.

Hunting Easter Eggs

 

 

 

 

 

 

Christmas Pictures, 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Merry Christmas, 2010

Dear All,

I was the big news this year—or at least my heart attack was. It came as a surprise while we were on our transatlantic cruise in April. When it hit, I thought I was just having a hard time cooling down after a mild walk around the deck. My heart was clicking at 207 beats/minute, and I couldn’t stop sweating. The cruise doctors stabilized me and patched me up enough so that I could get back to Danville, but pretty soon after that I was getting operated on, open heart surgery in fact. (If you want to read about the heart attack cruise, just click here.)

 

It took a while to build myself back up after that, but I’m happy to say that at this point I’m pretty much back to my old self, exercising and writing (I’ve finished my second novel Suitcase Charlie and am looking for a literary agent) and shoveling the snow and all of that other stuff.

And except for that bump in the road, we’ve all been doing pretty well. Lillian and Luciana bought a house, a beautiful two-story brick not far from us and near George Washington High School where Lillian teaches English and advises the school newspaper. When she’s not there, Lillian’s been painting and decorating her new home, and Luciana has been running around her house and playing in their enormous family room.

We’re all enjoying watching Luciana figure out all the stuff that she can do as she gets closer and closer to the Big Two. She loves to carry around books and ask us to read to her, and we love to accommodate her. She also likes to dance and play ball and knock down blocks and walk around with her blanket on her shoulder and her favorite doll Blah-blah in her hands. We can’t wait until Christmas morning and the new toys she’ll be getting from Santa, especially the Thomas the Tank Engine train.

Linda and I – even with all the time spent on my health – have done a lot of traveling this year. Beside our transatlantic heart attack cruise, we’ve enjoyed cruising on the Celebrity Solstice to the Caribbean with our wonderful neighbors Kathy and Mike and more recently exploring Columbia, Panama, and Costa Rica on the Jewel of the Sea. The photo of us in crash helmets is from a white water rafting adventure on that last cruise.

 

And we’re planning more trips for the new year. Linda’s checking flights and cruises and accommodations. She’s hoping to set up one trip for each month next year! So far she’s got us heading first to Connecticut in January to see Mabel and Tony and all the Calendrillos there and then the Caribbean in February. After that, I’m hoping to talk her into looking for a European trip. It’s been almost ten years since we’ve visited Rome or Paris or London.

By the way, we’ve also been to Las Vegas this year. I was trying not to mention the two trips we took because we didn’t do as well this year as last, but we did have a great time nonetheless traveling with our Valdosta friends James and Susan (Barron) LaPlant and Mabel and Tony Calendrillo.

When Linda’s not planning our trips, she volunteers at the Danville Free Clinic. This is her second year there, and she really loves helping folks without medical coverage to find the care they need. She also enjoys helping out with Luciana whenever she can. Recently, Linda’s started taking Luciana to the public library here, and both of them love playing with the books and the toys and the puzzles and children there.

It’s been a great year (except for that bump in the road I mentioned earlier), and we hope that all our friends find as much happiness in the coming year as we’ve found this last year.

 

What Vegetarians Eat for Thanksgiving

I get a lot of questions (and way too many jokes) this time of year about what vegetarians eat for Thanksgiving. Here's a picture of the meal we had.

 

It's roasted cauliflower and brussel sprouts, corn souffle, mashed potatoes with cheddar cheese, apricot dressing, and of course cranberry sauce.

For dessert, Lillian made a cranberry cake and a pumpkin pie, and Linda made fresh whipped cream.

 

 

We all had a great time and ate way too much!

Poems about God after 9/11

The following is the preface I wrote to a gathering of poems about God written in the aftermath of September 11. The preface and the poems by American, Polish, and Hungarian poets were published in the Scream Online in 2005:

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Before 9/11, I didn’t think much about God, and I hadn’t thought much about Him for a long, long time.

Oh, of course, I thought about Him on occasion. I thought about Him at Christmas time when my daughter Lillian was young and she’d ask me about who baby Jesus was. And I thought about God when I got interested in Isaac Bashevis Singer and started writing a series of articles about him. You can hardly write about Singer without writing about God—but there, I was thinking about God in a different sort of way. It was the way I thought about Him when I taught the great religious writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and T. S. Eliot and Fyodor Dostoevsky. God was an idea, a concept, that I was seeing through a lens and trying to make intellectual and academic sense of.

After 9/11, all that changed. When the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center came down, I discovered that God was no longer academic. He suddenly became important in my world. Not in the sense that I’ve come to believe what my father believed when he knelt every night and prayed in the darkness, nor in the sense that I came to believe what the Sisters of St. Joseph and the Christian Brothers taught me as I was growing up and attending grammar school and high school.

God became important in the sense that my world was suddenly touched and continues to be touched by those who believe in him firmly and absolutely.

They touch my world when they send terrorists here to the United States, and they touch my world when they send American troops to Iraq to bring Saddam Hussein down; and they touch my world when they take my students from my classrooms and send them to Afghanistan, or when they blow up abortion clinics and threaten those they disagree with; and they touch my world when they argue the centrality of faith in all political and social and cultural decisions.

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that Americans and terrorists are the same in any way except this one very important way: many of them are firmly committed to and acting out of their belief in God.

This simple idea, that good people and bad people can both be acting from a commitment to a similar impulse, the impulse to act as God wants us to act, has driven much of my poetry these last few years. I’ve been writing poems about God, to try to find and make sense of this simple idea. I want to understand this as much as I’ve ever wanted to understand anything.

When I told a poet friend of mine about this, when I told her I was thinking and writing about God, she told me something extraordinary. She was too. And she wasn’t the only one.

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Poets who contributed to this gathering are Jared Carter, Feliks Netz, M. L. Williams, M. J. Rychlewski, Marty Scott, Brooke Bergen, Sara McWhorter, Charles A. Fishman, Margaret Szumowski, David Feela, Michael Knisely, G. Gomori, Joe Survant, Homer Christensen, David Radavich, and me, John Guzlowski.

The poems themselves are available at the online arts and culture journal Scream Online.