Part of the brilliance of Kim Addonizio’s poetry resides in its tuna can lid cut to the wrist of reality: there is truth here which does not kill, but makes one bleed a bit, only you don’t know you’re bleeding until you see the drops staining your white blouse.
When asked to submit the 10 most influential books on my writing, Addonizio’s poetry sat at the top. She is not only an American treasure in the realm of poetry, she’s also a generous advocate to young poets. Her popular online poetry workshop is generative and intimate. She opens her home to legendary poetry salons in the tradition of the greatest writers throughout history, she is, in a word: wunderschön.
Your writing task should you choose to accept it is to concentrate a lifetime with one person in a moment of time, say, an hour as Kim Addonizio does in the poem, “Splendor Hour,” from the 2009 issue of Ping-Pong magazine. What specific images come up for you? A “purple jaw-breaker?” If someone were to invent a synonym for you, what would it be? Would you characterize your self-esteem as, “flashing minnows in the creek-trickle?” Can you “bear to open your eyes” on a self that’s true? Write a poem or a short-short story in response to Addonizio’s “Splendor Hour.” Find a quote from a poem or piece of prose to use as an epigraph as she does from William Wordsword’s poem,
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” which you should also read.
SPLENDOR HOUR
Nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass…
–Wordsworth
Where did you go?
I lost you like that grape jawbreaker
I’d saved for last. I ate
the Raisinets, I ate the Junior Mints
and every night I sat late at the kitchen table
not eating the canned lima beans
or just-thawed peas, until sneaking them
into a napkin or—once—my shoe.
So it wasn’t all splendor, my parents
wandering offstage to deliver soliloquies
while my older brother chased the kids with knives
or smacked me with the butt-end of a bottle,
inventing synonyms for stupid and ugly
to apply to the noun of his sister.
It wasn’t all cocoons in the apple boughs
and flashing minnows in the creek-trickle
of my self-esteem. But there was something
in the air of you, O hour, if only
because you were fugitive, barely there
even then, glimpsed and soon gone.
Now I think I see you, gleam
of a Diet Mountain Dew can crushed in the weeds.
Cellophane. Pop-top. Glass shard
shaped like lightning. The god
hiding, disguised, so the one
he would love can bear
to open her eyes.
Kim Addonizio has been called “one of our nation’s most provocative and edgy poets.” Her latest books are Lucifer at the Starlite, a finalist for the Poets Prize and the Northern CA Book Award; and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within, both from W.W. Norton. Her novel-in-verse, Jimmy & Rita, was recently reissued by Stephen F. Austin State University Press. Kalima Press published her Selected Poems in Arabic. Addonizio’s many honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two NEA Fellowships, and Pushcart Prizes for both poetry and the essay. Her collection Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist. Other books include two novels from Simon & Schuster, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. Her new story collection, The Palace of Illusions, is due from Counterpoint/Soft Skull in September 2014. Addonizio offers private poetry workshops in Oakland, NYC, and online, and often incorporates her love of blues harmonica into her readings. www.kimaddonizio.com.
A Moment
The night began just like every other one
Warm air
Full of fire, laughter
Then you snuck up on me in the early fog
I saw a glimpse of you face, your tone made me laugh, then smile
The evening moon’s light danced around your smile and then I saw you, just sitting there, happy, content
A life time of a fine, restless dance
I found me, surrounded by questions
Ones I still answer, awkwardly, since you’ve gone
I had holes I once tried to fill with you
But they are gone
I still sit, with our chips, and read
I rarely think of you
That took forever
But Sometimes when I roll over, I can feel you
Your hand on my head, whispering
Warm, tingly
It calms me, makes me be still
I can’t remember you as well anymore
Not like I use to
I cannot even see you in the fog
and that makes me happy.
But sometimes I can still hear you
And your touch can still make me feel calm
So I will hold on to that part for now.
An All Too Brief Hour
“To feed the remains of life with one hour of fullness and freedom!
With on brief hour of madness and joy.”
~Walt Whitman
That Bazooka bubble gum sure tasted good-
It looked better in your hair. You got back at me.
Chasing me Norman Bates-style around the kitchen
Cackling when I cried, good thing that knife was blunt.
When did that psycho evanesce?
Mini-me’s and diapers and child car seats
And superheroes and Converse and videogames.
You used to clone me in your dreams
Creep me out with your Pennywise stare, shark-sharp yellow
Teeth, glistening enflamed tongue. It all floated down
That polluted storm drain. We were not rescued
Going down the volcanic back roads of
Childhood on Goodwill bikes.
Listening to our mother’s tragic nightly operas-
Each performance had its charms. Most are still
Tedious and self-absorbed. I rant, rave, repeat them.
Madness is after all inherited. True freedom had to be stolen-
From me. Why couldn’t you live by the sister code?
My straight and narrow path did not stray, yours did.
Don’t pack everything into that brief hour
Before midnight. Galloping down the steep staircase, our innocence
Left behind handfuls of hair and memories of
Joy yanked away. Why did we have to grow up? Being an adult sucks.
You dance naked around the May pole while I
Howl at the full moon of my misery.
Losing Him All Over Again
I melt into you
The drumming of your chest under mine,
You nestle me closer to you
Whenever a noise arouses in the dark.
I fall into my dreams quickly
You kiss my head and I slumber with you in bed,
Side by side we sleep,
My head on your chest for a lifetime it seemed.
Until little people became fearful of dreams
And they crept in between us,
Late night cups of water and early morning times for school
Curfews being broken with wild boys who don’t understand mom’s rules.
Through the graduations, through the weddings, and through the struggle
Your smile held me up,
Those soft brown eyes ensuring me that everything was going to be just fine
Until the day you started to lose your mind.
The memories all but fading away
The days are lost to you
The fog pollutes your sense of time,
We sit and look through images you can’t recall
We cry, when you can’t remember any at all.
Your hands have aged
Your hair has greyed,
But you can’t seem to remember
How you survive each day.
Slowly I feed you stories of our love,
You remember my name, you remember the first kiss
And most importantly you remember how I love to sleep with my head on your chest.
Love is when you meet someone
who tells you something new about yourself
-Andre Breton
Love Clock
I met you in a second
I loved you in a minute
And within the hour I had to let you go
You allowed me to shine
I felt so divine
Embracing our love
Cherishing each moment in time
There was no where I’d rather be
Then right next you
Sharing our secrets
Sharing our laughter
This love that felt so true
You loving me was all that I could see
Your arms to hold
Your lips to kiss
The clock seemed to pause
Our love was that immense
Waking up to your beautiful face
Listening closely to your beautiful voice
Feeling your soft skin
You never failed in
Letting me know to we would always be
These seconds of time are all I need
But you left and
The clock kept ticking for me
Your moves the way
the sea and sky do ,
musical turbulent,
– Elaine Sexton
That of crinkling unbalanced is all that is know
All feels as so,
growing tempestuous and paths upon paths of sharpen piece of glass.
Calls for the skin underneath ones foot to din and gash.
You creation has now come to be that of equivalent to a musical orchestra
One thriving off a complexity full of a divinely red
Blood shots dripped deep inside and briefly amongst the surface
Yet a life time of upbringing shaped a much stable state of turbulence
A thousand of hours
A thousand of sharpen words
A thousand hours worth of blood shot composition
Have drained all that one’s spirit has detained
For the skin underneath the soul of my feet no longer tares nor clings
For the thousands hors of spoken sharped words
which went hand by hand as if sea and sky
like cord and string have stayed behind me and within the for murky musical walls you’ve poised.
You unwillingly admit that your thoughts carry you awake at night question why did I go?
For all that is inside and outside of my own composition has discarded the fatherly composition of your theatrical turbulence
In your eyes your orchestra was never serene
For your eyes are as shallow as you allow them to be
Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances
Of the terrible doubt of appearances,
Of the uncertainty after all – that we may be deluded,
That may-be reliance and hope are but speculations after all,
That may-be identity beyond the grave is a beautiful fable only…
-Walt Whitman
It is strange that I think of most
the reminder of the promises
to remain an earthly being, as if any person has the choice.
Secondly, I wonder
if the prayer I said out loud, but never memorized,
went anywhere, or
if there is such a thing as anywhere.
The Catholic saint under your pillow
may have heard this type of hesitation
in my voice, or perhaps
the night he would have listened,
you fell asleep too soon.
In searching for answers, I’m often lead to one place,
a fuzzy memory now, a time capsule,
a sanctuary, a prison, a shrine,
with the happiest hippopotamus, the greenest of walls,
where the dream took place
that kept us praying ten times a day,
and your mother, hundreds,
the Catholic saint
still under your pillow.
There are no answers,
and I have learned
that you are never too far from me,
as long as I remain the earthly being,
forever susceptible to speculation.
“All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
-E. A. Poe
Unbelievable dark skies,
All I hear are loud cries
I fear the end of the world is near.
I don’t know where I am or
How to get home?
Unknown faces stare at me,
Do they know?
In a blink of an eye,
Everything changes.
I see myself dead to the world,
In a dreamland of no return.
Red clouds that travel fast and bright lights with no sound,
Fire falling from the sky like meteors crashing
Where do I run? Where do I hide?
Wake up! Wake up!
If not a dream then a nightmare, it seems.
Yet we meet again.
I hate our times face to face.
You inspire nothing in me.
Nothing but hate, and rage.
I aspire you to be far away from me.
But I must work to get away from you myself,
Since it is pretty obvious you are going nowhere,
fast.
Except maybe hell,
but it’s still not fast enough for me.
If there were no consequences…
If there were no consequences…
if here were no consequences…
I shutter at my own thoughts.
You inspire nothing in me.
“You fill the room with sweet sensation
distracting bits of information”
-Joanne Wasserman
You feel me up night and day
There is not a moment where I can live without you
I think about you everyday
No matter where I go I think of you
I always find you
Only to be mistaken
Missing you when you are not there
The stolen moments we shared
Even during school we try to find each other
Staying together as long as we can
Laughing with each other
Having the same classes and
Looking inside your eyes
Not caring what goes on around me
We get in trouble
But that doesn’t matter
As long as we have each other
Our love is sweet
And eternal.
“A never ending love”
Within the hour my love for you couldn’t of have been stronger.
The immense butterflies and the rosy cheeks I get at times.
With that smile that can turn my gray days to the brightest blue.
With just one look I can immensely know that this is love.
The endless laughter,
The endless smiles,
and the endless love is what I was looking for
Forever in love I’ll be