National Poetry Month: Angela Alaimo O'Donnell

Vincent Van Gogh, Almond Blossoms, 1890, oil on canvas, Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam

Happy weekend R&W’ers!

It’s hard to believe we’re well into springtime and only a week from Easter. I’m so glad for springtime, but I won’t lie, I’d like to pump the brakes a little on time. If only…

This week I’m continuing our poet focus, highlighting poets from Ben Palpant’s recently released, An Axe from the Frozen Sea: Conversations with poets about what matters most. As I mentioned in my first post of this series, my goal is to highlight four poets from the book, and then offer my own poetic responses to my time in Europe (which is where I am as you read these words), the last two weeks of April.

I hope my meager attempts will embolden you to play with words poetically as well.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

O’Donnell was one of the many poets in Palpant’s book I’d not yet read. I’m enjoying her collection, Holy Land. It feels fitting, having it with me while traveling; discovering new “holy lands” through experiencing “holy moments” in unexpected places and ways.

Here are some of my favorite “holy moments” from Ben’s Palpant’s interview with Angela Alaimo O’Donnell:

On her role as a poet:

“My role as a poet isn’t to shake people awake; that’s my role as a teacher. With poetry, I attempt to say, ‘Hey Self, sit up, pay attention, be alert to what’s going on around you.’ If I were to describe my mind as a poet, it’s like a rabbit, ears raised and twitching, listening. You never know in which direction it might dart. On the other hand, my husband says I’m more like a bird, flitting about, gathering pieces of this or that…. I suppose that’s what I’m doing with poetry. My material comes from all over the place. Sometimes it comes from the natural world, sometimes from memory, sometimes from popular culture…. All these disparate experiences are crying out to be ordered in some way. that’s what poetry can do. When I don’t write, I feel very disordered and de-centered.”

…I want to remain myself but also leave myself behind. It’s trying to get beyond myself—to open up vistas—while there is also this reflexive move that requires the poet to return to his own life and heart, to ultimately say what it might mean to him and to us.” (p. 185-186)

On the Catholic Imagination:

“One of the hallmarks of the Catholic imagination is to recognize that everything means something and it means it intensely,” she says. “As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Creation, every single thing, points back to its maker. In that respect, every created thing is a living thing, alive with the fire God put into it. One of the poet’s jobs is to note that fire and to help us see it. I think God has even given this gift to unbelieving poets; he lets them see a glimpse of that fire and wonder in nature and the human heart. The best poets, regardless of religious belief, have this sense that there’s something greater than us, something transcendent that everything points toward. Robert Frost was not a terribly religious man, but there’s no question that as a poet he saw these things around him and, therefore, made them visible to us as well.” (p. 188)

On writing as healing:

“Although you strike me as someone whose joy bubbles over, there’s much hurt in your life…. Would you say that you are straining light through poetry?

“Absolutely. Writing helps. It’s not an accident that soldiers who return from war are given writing classes. It gives them an opportunity to articulate the trauma of what they have experienced. Writing is an important part of healing. We should do more of it. I started young, maybe five or six. There was a part of me that really wanted to become an opera singer, but we couldn’t afford singing lessons so that was out. But I could write poems. All I needed was a piece of paper, a pen, and a love for words. I discovered that there was something powerful about recording the things that happened to me. Those events became more meaningful and consequential, making poetry made me feel like I mattered more. It was tremendously empowering experience. More importantly, the poems redeemed the poverty, alienation, and darkness I experienced….

“In some ways, poets are myth-makers, making intentional decisions about how certain events will be remembered without lying about the events. We’re imposing order on events by the choices we make, the way we use language, poetic forms, and all the tools at our disposal. And that’s important for the human experience. Many of the greatest poems were born out of suffering, from an urge to make some kind of sense of it, to create an order that will redeem the suffering.” (190-191)

Poetry to dwell with:

As Kingfishers Catch Fire
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —
Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces. 

God's Grandeur
By Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

To Be a Pilgrim
By Angela Alaimo O’Donnell

                  To be a pilgrim is to ring the stones

                  with the clean music of your best black heels,

                  each click a lucky strike that sparks a fire

                  to see by, that lights up the long and level road

                  you walk with no map, no stick, no wheels

                  to relieve you when your feet ache and tire.


                  To be a pilgrim own what you own,

                  stuff it in your clutch, lug it in your tote,

                  all the heavy history you’d like to lose

                  nestled up against your dead mother’s shoes.

                  To be a pilgrim you must be a killer

                  of myth, a new invention of desire.

                  Every pilgrim is a truth-teller.

                  Every pilgrim is a liar.

Northern Nights
By: Angela Aliamo O'Donnell

“What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?”
Robert Hayden

None of us could sleep those coal-black nights.
The furnace coughed deep in the cellar
until our father rose in the iron cold
his footsteps sounding loud through the quiet
house, five of us huddled tight in two beds.

We’d hear the turn of the handle, the chunk
and swing of the metal door unhinged,
the steady thrust of the rusty shovel
graveling against the binful of coal.
We’d hear him hoping in the dark for fire.

Then the sluff of slippers across the kitchen,
the oven door opening and the match,
and soon my mother’s voice echoing
up the steep stairs to our attic room
calling us to hot milk at midnight,

to slip on coats and scarves and hats and gloves,
to sit in the circle around the stove
bound together in blankets, two by three,
to watch each other’s heavy heads drowse
in the orange glow of that blue flame.

While our father cursed the furnace man below,
the smell of sulfur rising through the house,
as our mother worried wordless on the stairs,
we moved closer, wove our circle tight
against the cold that claimed them in the dark.

Next week: Li-Young Lee

Thanks for being here, and for joining me on this poetry journey through April.

Until we meet again: Read wide and read well!