The background here is that my daughter’s new violin teacher asked her to memorize a poem and recite it “with feeling.” (Can you beat that? He is so awesome!) Lena picked “Bear Song” by Kay Ryan, because she thought it would be easy to memorize. Here it is:

If I were a bear
with a bear sort of belly

that made it hard
to get up after sitting

and if I had paws
with pads on the ends

and a kind of a tab
where a tail might begin

and a button eye
on each side of my nose

I’d button the flap
of the forest closed.

And when you came
with your wolf and your stick

to the place that once was
the place to get in

you’d simply be
at the edge of the town

and your wolf wouldn’t know
a bear was around.

Eh? The flap of the forest? Your wolf and your stick? Your wolf? It’s a strange little poem, ain’t it? The belly, paw pads, and button eyes suggest maybe a teddy bear, but the second half of the poem, with the wolf and the stick and the YOU feels almost menacing. Naw, couldn’t be.

Lena found “Bear Song” in an anthology called Poetry Speaks to Children. It has a wide variety of poems, many of which are obviously written for children (R.L. Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Margaret Wise Brown, etc.). Others are by “grownup” authors (Shakespeare, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Blake, Rilke, etc.). Still others (like Kay Ryan) I’d never heard of. However, the fact that the poem is in a children’s anthology makes me want to give it a gentle interpretation. Yeah, must be a teddy bear. Maybe even a puppet — a wolf on a stick? And the flap of the forest could be, I dunno, the scenery of the puppet show. Still makes no sense, but the illustration kind of bears out (ha ha) that reading. You can click on the image to see a full-size version.

But wait! This book comes with a CD! Duh, we could actually listen to the author read the poem! Wonder if that would make a difference to my understanding (or lack thereof). So we popped the CD into the player, hit track 9, and… whoa! I’ve uploaded it here. Listen if you can (I’ve never uploaded an audio file before), and then come back.

It has a whole different meaning now, doesn’t it. It’s a real bear, and you’d best not disturb it. “You” are a hunter, and your wolf and stick are your hunting dog and rifle. Or, since this is a children’s anthology, maybe it’s a grumpy kid, feeling bearish, who wants to be left alone, and you and your wolf and stick are the grownups who keep bothering you. Either way, this poem definitely has a dark side. And the illustration, I now realize, is crap.

So, next question: who the heck is Kay Ryan? Well… it turns out she is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Her profile at poets.org describes her poems as “compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes” and the New York Times says she is “known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes.” Yes, I think both quotes could apply to “Bear Song,” don’t you? Even better, though, is this hilarious article that she wrote about the one and only time she attended a writers’ conference:

It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side.

Ha ha, I love this woman! What a kindred spirit! Except for the bit about orchestral music, I agree with everything she said. Especially *ahem* the “cranky self-taught.” Knowing this about her, the meaning of “Bear Song” becomes even clearer, doesn’t it. Yes indeed, she’s a grumpy old bear lady who just wants to be left alone. No doubt about it.

I wish I didn’t need all this extra information in order to be able to understand a poem, though.

The book I have is The Poems of Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman. 374 pages of poems, and I’m hard-pressed to find a single one I can understand. Almost every single poem — and many of them are quite short — contains words or names I don’t understand, and even the ones in relatively plain English demand much head-scratching. It’s quite humbling.

Here’s one of the easier ones:

Silence

My father used to say,

“Superior people never make long visits,

have to be shown Longfellow’s grave

or the glass flowers at Harvard.

Self-reliant like the cat –

that takes its prey to privacy,

the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth –

they sometimes enjoy solitude,

and can be robbed of speech

by speech which has delighted them.

The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;

not in silence, but in restraint.”

Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”

Inns are not residences.

Of course, the first thing I thought of when I read this was “Self-reliant like the cat? Huh. I wish my cat would take his prey to privacy!” ;)

Here’s one I don’t get, but it sounds kinda cool. Maybe someone can explain it to me.

Man’s Feet Are a Sensational Device

Rest assured that netting butterflies,

Flying from mice,

And crushing spiders,

Is portentous cowardice.

The field of moral choice affords man’s

Feet crackling ice

To tread, and feet are

A sensational device.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate — but there is no competition –

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I just love that so much. It’s both the story of my life (“trying to learn to use words”) and my motto (“there is only the trying”).

Red-headed restaurant cashier

Shake back your hair, O red-headed girl.

Let go your laughter and keep your two proud freckles on your chin.

Somewhere is a man looking for a red-headed girl and some day maybe he will look into your eyes for a restaurant cashier and find a lover, maybe.

Around and around go ten thousand men hunting a red-headed girl with two freckles on her chin.

I have seen them hunting, hunting.

Shake back your hair; let go your laughter.

And guess what? Harvest Poems is a page-turner. Who knew? Sandburg reminds me of Woody Guthrie. Very similar themes, imagery, etc.

Anyway, here’s one that grabbed me right away. It’s about something that I ponder constantly: the animal-ness of human beings.

Wilderness

There is a wolf in me…fangs pointed for tearing gashes…a red tongue for raw meat…and the hot lapping of blood — I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fox in me…a silver-gray fox…I sniff and guess…I pick things out of the wind and air…I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers…I circle and loop and double-cross.

There is a hog in me…a snout and a belly…a machinery for eating and grunting…a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun — I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go.

There is a fish in me…I know I came from salt-blue water-gates…I scurried with shoals of herring…I blew waterspouts with porpoises…before land was…before the water went down…before Noah…before the first chapter of Genesis.

There is a baboon in me…clambering-clawed…dog-faced…yawping a galoot’s hunger…hairy under the armpits…here are the hawk-eyed hankering men…here are the blonde and blue-eyed women…here they hide curled asleep waiting…ready to snarl and kill…ready to sing and give milk…waiting — I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so.

There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird…and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want…and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes — And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness.

O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart — and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where — For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.