In 2010

The Best American Poetry 2

O10 includes Updike (who’d died

the year before); John Ashbery, doubt

-ing the approach of spring; and Ann Carson,

“Wildly Constant”; Tom Clark, “excavation

too’s required / Cries out the hungry unborn poem / Within us, demanding to exist as /

If alive”; G. C. Waldrep, “That was the spring

the bees disappeared”; J. E. Wei, “So Long,

my pine, So Long, my pine.” I skim, of course

over Derek Walcott and other fine poets.

Obama was president. A hopeful

year, all in all, for U.S. poetry.

What, then, suppose of 2025?

The Best American Poetry 2O10, edited by Amy Gerstler and David Lehman (Scribner Poetry, 2010).

Thursday, August 28, 2025

Cleome

Sensu stricto—"in the strict sense,”

See the spiny spiderflower,

Whose old Greek name wants recompense.

Pollinated by bats—aloof,

In fact, from spiders [everywhere,

With over 53,000 species—

The genus Cleome has 199],

My specimen's a volunteer

That a sturdy head endowers,

Rebooting on its single stalk

(Verses meant to picture flowers

Can't shrink from orchidaceous talk!)

Time and again, there, bidding fair—

Depucelating maiden air . . .

Note: Cleome does not belong among the Orchidaceae. However, that genus name, the term "orchid," and the adjective "orchidaceous" all derive from ancient Greek ὄρχις orchis, meaning "testicle."

The name "cleome" was probably devised by Linnaeus from Greek kleos, glory.

Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Original Sin

—Say it, no ideas but in things—

William Carlos Williams

But likewise also say: No things but in ideas.

Grinning there at birth, those karmic dogs, old fears

That breach the bloody door where we come in,

Dr. Pelagius points to the poor red mewling thing,

“You mean you think that's full of Original Sin?”*

And circumcises the mite to set it right.

Time now to reconsider everything we thought;

We could be wrong! What was that stuff we bought?

The unacknowledged legislators, as Shelley said,

Of the world,* may in these after times find inspiration dead,

Or faint, or ill, or sorely gulled;

Hope's integument, whose plastic shield

leads power tools to yield.

(Dumb rhyme—it mocks the tongue-tied hierophant!)

How, then, to write poetry . . . when you can't?

* Randall Jarrell, Introduction to the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams (New Directions paperback, 1969), ix.

** “. . . hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration . . . mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not. . . . Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry” (1821)

Sunday, August 24, 2025