“There is another world, and it is in this one”

-Paul Éluard

“He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.”

-John 1:10

Boo hoo. The modern world we live in does not appreciate poetry. Not like it ought to, not like you and I do. We get it. We eagerly await that new journal or book of poems, smuggle it like contraband into our grey morning commute. We find the one poem that, as Dickinson put it, takes the top of our head off. And it stays with us all day, as we go about our work counting beans or scrubbing out loos. It changes who we are and how we see the world. But nobody else really gets it, and the lack of money is there to prove it.

So maybe we’re doomed.

But poetry has already changed the world–yours, mine–irrevocably in altering how we see it. It is in the world, making and re-making it, and the world has not a clue. But we know. And so we go on reading and writing, having great conversations long past bedtime, walking through the gentle misery of everyday living with this secret knowledge, this little spark that could light the whole world on fire–but doesn’t. Perhaps never will.

Maybe we’re doomed. But we are doomed in good company–you and me–which is to say we are blessed indeed. Ask anyone. The poets always throw the best parties. They dance like they have nothing to lose, because it’s true. And you and me, we’ve made it this far somehow, getting by, doing our thing, making life just about work. John Keats died largely unrecognised. But ask his friends at the time, and he meant as much to them then as he does to many of us now. Do we really expect better for ourselves than the respect of a few respectable peers?

The audience is dwindling. Fine. If you need someone to write for, write for me. I mean it. I need your poems as much as I ever did–the ones I can carry around with me, the blue flame, the chip of ice in my heart. Good news: I am not the only one with eyes to see or ears to hear. Want to build a larger audience for poetry? Live your life with such pure ferocity and rollicking panache that people beg you to tell them your secret. Then slip them your favourite book of poems.

Can we really pretend to be surprised that a world so dense with paradox and ugliness, drone wars and drudgery, ignores this refined art form? But precisely because of this, I need your best poems more than ever before. And you need them too. Someone gave you the power to see the world differently, and–even better–to share it. We’ve been given fire by the gods and now we’re arguing over its market potential. Let’s stop. We’ll make ends meet as we always did. And a little salt in the wound sometimes helps with the healing.

So go on now. This is the party. This is the gift. You’re here. You’re in it. One day we’ll look back and call these the good old days. So I say this for all of us, including me–who perhaps needs to hear it the most–with love and respect: Stop complaining. Stop bickering. Go write.

But imagine my frustration at being beat in search engine results for my own name by someone who has been dead for almost 400 years. I decided to channel that frustration into a tribute in the form of a digital experiment.

What follows is the poem I wrote for Robert Peake the Elder, an English painter in the court of King James I. I have added links on various phrases in the poem to images of portraits that inspired the text. I have also included audio of me reading the poem, and a gallery of images at the bottom of the page.

Namesake
(to Robert Peake the Elder, c. 1551–1619)

Whenever I look for myself, I find you,
in the smirking red lips of nobility,
high foreheads unmarred by frown lines,
plunging into narrow noses, eyebrows
raised enquiringly, hand-on-hip or hand-
on-chest, close to the sword, the heart,
each making the art of dominion seem
effortless. You made danger your business,
painting the princess who became Winter’s
Queen, the prince who blazed into infamy,
one hand stroking the notable features,
the other rubbing blemishes to a glow.
You gave the public a profile to recognise,
suitors an image to scar in the mind,
enemies an opponent worthy to despise–
smoothing and lightening, your own figures
of nobility half-studied in the impatient
gaze of human sitters, half evoked in symbols
poured over the comely calves of gentle-
folk in gleaming silk, pearls dotted
with a single hair of liquid gypsum
(making each oyster’s teardrop shine),
lace collars laced with linseed oil
(washed into translucence like a dream).
I ego-surf my way through glowing pages,
my own head shots mixed with Jacobites
and Tudors, Bohemians fancying themselves
as Grecian deities, enmeshed and immortalised
by a computer’s comprehension of same letters
in same order, nothing more, while your
faces peer back from beneath the two words
I used to like to think of as “myself”.

My own addition to the issue is “London Blues”. Prof. Robert Hass’s “Poetry of American Cultures” lectures at UC Berkeley introduced me to American blues as not only a musical but also a poetic form. However, I scarcely could have guessed at that time that I would take up the form years later in relation to my new life in London.

Copies are available at Foyle’s on Charing Cross Road, Royal Festival Hall, the London Review Bookshop, and can be ordered by mail through contacting Peter Ebsworth.

I love the theme of this issue and look forward to the other urban animal poems, which will be published on the site in the coming days.

Read and listen to “Mice of the London Underground” online at qarrtsiluni.

Photo: Deborah Leigh

The poem “Letter From My Migraine” is now available online at the edgy e-zine Ink Sweat & Tears. A concussion at age five brought my soccer career to a halt, and began a lifelong relationship with intense cranial pain. The poem gives a brief glimpse into our recent correspondence.

Read “Letter From My Migraine” at Ink Sweat & Tears.

Discover all six hotspots, and view an interactive map of locations, on HuffPo UK.

My short poetry collection The Silence Teacher is now available from Poetry Salzburg. It distills nearly seven years of writing about love and loss into just thirty-two pages, and is dedicated to the memory of our son.

The poems in this collection were written in both America and England. They encompass the two years of my MFA in Writing degree at Pacific University, wherein the encouragement of my mentors Sandra Alcosser, Marvin Bell, and Joseph Millar, alongside many gifted students and friends, helped me to take up William Stafford’s challenge to revise, not only my work, but my life.

Many thanks to Dr. Wolfgang Görtschacher and Andreas Schachermayr, not only for selecting this manuscript, but for working very diligently and efficiently since then to bring it to publication. Pre-orders are now shipping from Austria and, if you have not already, you can order your own copy here.

They have been publishing an anthology of member poems every other year since their founding in 1977. I am delighted to have two poems in their newest anthology, Urban Harvest, and pleased to announce that it is now available for sale online at their website.

The book ships throughout the UK, however you can also contact the group coordinator if you are interested in ordering from abroad.

You can order a copy or subscribe to Orbis here.

Enjoy the poem.

Perhaps to reassure us, since they knew we wanted to try for another child, the doctors told us that what had happened to us was a one-in-one-thousand occurence in the developed world. In the Euromillions lottery, beating one-in-one-thousand odds will win you about fifteen pounds. What happened to me seven years ago was worth so much more than that.

In the past, I would have defined a miracle as a significant, often inexplicable change in a course of events toward an outcome I had been hoping for. The miracle of James coming into our life, however, turned into something I had never imagined would happen, and something I would not wish on anyone. Yet I still call his birth a miracle, because it transformed me.

I was not changed into the father I was expecting to be: toting my son around in a backpack on hikes through the Ojai valley, changing diapers, and proudly displaying photos of first teeth in emails to overseas grandparents. I was transformed by the essence of fatherhood: that pure and selfless love that compelled me to do everything I could do to love and care for my son during those three days–and then to let him go.

James did nothing more praiseworthy than simply being born, and yet I loved (and love) him so completely that there is nothing I wouldn’t do for him. James never had anything to prove, anything to accomplish, anything even to do in this world. Yet he was perfect to me, and precious beyond words. I returned from the hospital with Val, completely stripped of my worldly ambitions. I knew that the only thing that mattered now was love.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky often wrote, both directly and through his fiction, about the effect of his own experience of being condemned to death, and then having his life spared moments before his execution. One swears in the moments before death never again to take a moment of living for granted. Then invariably, once spared, one slips back into old habits as the veil of mundane living descends again. It has been this way to some extent for me as well.

Yet this reference point of selfless love and surrender to the inevitable has stayed with me, like a lantern in my heart, like a child both born and waiting to be born again. Not a day goes by that I do not sense it. It has taken me seven years to be able to acknowledge that I do in fact feel lucky for having had those three days with James. Because it transformed the seven years that followed, not only through grief, but through love.

A child was born and a father was resurrected. In the darkest days of winter, the light of a brilliant star. Thank you, my son, for teaching me about miracles, for making me the lucky one.

“You must revise your life.”

The audience at the T.S. Eliot Shortlist Reading were the real winners. They were treated to Gillian Clarke’s quiet tenderness, like a swan navigating a near-frozen lake. They relished the sweet sibilance of beekeeper Sean Borodale. Julia Copus gave visions of ova during IVF as ghost-like “luminous pearls.” Michael Schmidt wove Jorie Graham’s linguistic basketwork into their ears. Simon Armitage read out passages of “the British Illiad”. Kathleen Jamie let us witness how she, like her “Roses”, “haggle for my little portion of happiness.” They gasped overhearing Jacob Polley’s conversation between a mum and her stoic stabbed son. They were dogged by Deryn Rees-Jones into regarding “man’s best friend” a little differently. And wisecracking Paul Farley made them all laugh out loud.

Then a girlish woman with long grey hair, pinned back by three small sparkling barrettes, took to the stage. She seemed to read for the shortest span of time–just two poems. Yet what was remarkable is that just as these poems, in their simple, plain-spoken way, were getting good enough for most poets to consider them complete, hers go further. An impressive meditation on breasts transcends the obvious observations, as the poet tells us that, just as this one part of them was once adored by boys when they were teenagers, what all women really want is to be as adored in their entirety this much.

This is the mature Sharon Olds. This is the winner of the 2012 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. She joins Mark Doty, another poet of intense observation, as one of just two Americans to take home this prize.

Yet this American poet, who pushed the envelope of confessional poetry and inspired a generation toward the genre in its heyday seems at first a somewhat unlikely choice for a British award. Olds was not always writing redemptive poems about personal loss. As a student, I still recall certain poems in Satan Says, like those of Larry Levis and a handful of others, that in the course of deeply probing the human condition found their way to the topic of brutal and sadistic physical and psychological violence. They still disturb me so much that I can not re-read them to this day. Yet this ability to abide great emotional difficulty is what makes Sharon’s most recent work able to extoll “homemade kindness” in a way that feels genuinely earned.

The truth is, we all want to be redeemed, even in a culture that prides itself on restraint. We want to choose integration and meaning over cynicism and despair. Olds happens to have achieved it, not despite but through the application of a deep sensitivity to her life and art. You could see it last night on her face, as she stood humbly facing the spotlight. She is a different woman than when she began her poetry career. The extent to which this is evident in her work must be what convinced the judges unanimously to make of her most recent collection of poetry, as she has made of herself, an example to us all.

This piece has also been re-syndicated on The Huffington Post.