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Loved then, Loved Now: Half a Loaf
Half a Loaf
Kay Ryan’s Half a Loaf from p. 58, The Best of It: New and Selected, 2010)
The whole loaf’s loft
is halved in profile,
like the standing side
of a bombed cathedral.
The cut face
of half a loaf
puckers a little.
The bread cells
are open and brittle
like touching coral.
It is nothing like the middle
of an uncut loaf,
nothing like a conceptual half
which stays moist.
I say do not adjust to half
unless you must.
The image of a bread as a cathedral, of bubbles as bombing, the exhortation to not settle for a disaster but a wholeness, I keep coming back to.
Why I like poetry
I read novels. Not all novels but. In the exceptional one each sentence hooks forward and stands fresh in perspective.
For example,
“One of the doctors said that his boot had probably saved his life, and she felt like kissing it, although in all the confusion, no one knew exactly where it had ended up.”
Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Tree.
For example
Before me an older man of about my height but with fully twice my mass in his upper body. His torso was the size and shape of a bass drum
the piano mover arrives in T.E. Carhart’s The Piano Shop on the West Bank.
Low density sometimes distresses me. In sources unnamed there are other sentences.
Beyond narrator predicting, then it playing out as predicted, events happened then being recounted to another character the same way, and antecedent problems, so many redundancies and padding drive me just a little batty.
She gave her name to one of the doormen
manning the entrance.She stepped out the door and looked up at the blue
sky outside.She looked down at the terra cotta
floor tiles.She took in the cast plaster medallions and dentil
on the ceiling.She wondered if the little pink pill
she swallowedwas to blame.She shrugged
her shoulders.
She cut a piece of cheese and put it on a cracker, which was cold from the fridge.She took her place
at the end of theline.The bell over the door jingled
redactedas the door shut after her.
I could pass over typos easier. Likewise poetry can state and explain the obvious but published ones are more likely to have been edited.
Bhanu Kapil’s famous “12 Questions”
Over at Via Negativa where the Poetry Blogging Network happens there are interviews using Bhanu Kapil’s famous “12 Questions“. Chen Chen uses “12 Questions” for a number of poems in his new book: Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother? What is the shape of your body? How will you live now? What are the consequences of silence? How will you/have you prepared for your death? What would you say if you could? Who are you and whom do you love? What do you remember about the earth? How will you begin? Describe a morning you woke without fear. Tell me what you know about dismemberment. Where did you come from/How did you arrive?