Prompt: Cemetery

A cemetery seems to be a rather grim place and sad prompt, but I find cemeteries preferable to hospitals. I certainly don't spend very much time visiting cemeteries these days but as a youth I made pilgrimages to several poets grave sites in my New Jersey. I visited Stephen Crane buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Hillside, Allen Ginsberg at B'Nai Israel Cemetery in Newark, Walt Whitman at Harleigh Cemetery in Camden and William Carlos Williams buried at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst,

What did I expect to find besides a headstone and grass or flowers?  I'm not sure. Perhaps a ghostly presence? Some inspiration? There were no supernatural presences, but I did write about the visits.

I looking for poems for this call for submissions and found many poems about cemeteries. The poet Billy Collins said, "Oh, you're majoring in English? So then you're majoring in death." There is some truth in that humorous line, but the range of approaches to the subject by poets is wide. Not all poems about cemeteries are about death.

 In "The Mountain Cemetery" by Edgar Bowers, we find this description:
With their harsh leaves old rhododendrons fill
The crevices in grave plots’ broken stones.
The bees renew the blossoms they destroy,
While in the burning air the pines rise still,
Commemorating long forgotten biers.
Their roots replace the semblance of these bones...

"Oak Grove Cemetery" by Don Thompson, opens with a bit of hope.
Just enough rain an hour ago
to give the wispy dry grass some hope,
turning it green instantly.

In Key West, the living surround the dead,
who are the best neighbors
silent and agreeable as well-swept porches...
writes Jacqueline Allen Trimble in "Walking Beside the Cemetery, Olivia Street, Key West"  

 
Madeline Tiger

While assembling this prompt, I received word that a poet friend, Madeline Tiger, had died in December. Madeline was the first Dodge Foundation poet I had as an instructor for their poetry workshops for teachers back in the 1980s. She was a gentle soul and a knowledgeable poet and we stayed in touch for decades when she lived nearby in New Jersey. I lost touch with her in this century as she had moved away, but I continued to read her poetry. 

A friend posted her poem, "The Mockingbird in May" from her book, The Atheist's Prayer, online with a notice about her passing and so I felt the universe was telling me to use it this month. Jim Haba, who started the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Program and created its biannual poetry festival (and who was my first literature professor at Rutgers) often said that reading a poet's work is a way we keep them alive.

Madi's poem made me think of "At a Jewish Cemetery in Pittsburgh" by Peter Oresick.
...I set down my son
and he crawls in the dimness,
pulling himself up on the headstone.
How delicately he fingers the marble.
Quickly he rounds its corner. Vanishes.
I’m thinking: grass, stone, quiet–
then babbling from another world.

Another poet, Thomas Lux, taught that what you see in your mind when you hear a word like "cemetery" is not what anyone else sees. We all have personal associations with words based on our experiences and knowledge.

What images does "cemetery" create in your mind? Negative, positive, sad, peaceful, nostalgic, or angry images? Is it a place of death or a peaceful, quiet, green parkland?

In general, people don't visit cemeteries as much as they did a century ago. Being buried in the ground isn't even as common as it once had been.  "Tree Cemetery" by Wu Sheng is a poem that addresses alternatives.  
Plant a tree in place of a grave
Plant a patch of trees in place of a cemetery
Put a flowerbed around each tree
Lay the ashes of the deceased to rest by the stump

For our March issue, we ask you to write a poem inspired by the word cemetery. Your poem does not have to be set in that location, but it might be a real place that is now only a memory.

Here is Madeline's poem:

The Mockingbird in May

A mockingbird sings near my son's grave
He is out of sight, one of many in the great oak trees,
but the song is intensely clear,

coming through the wind and the leaves.
The evening empties.  Nothing here
but rustle and song and gusty breeze.

Unseasonably cold after the hard
rain, Sunday ends with bright sky
to the east, over there where

a woodpecker rattles an undertow.
Another echoes it higher,
louder against a dark tree.

All I know are the sparrows,
the dove call, the mocking,
the low staccato roll, the caw of crows--

the descent, the pebbles placed in a
row on the tombstone to represent
the mourner who came
and those others who didn't come.

I like the way the poet has used birds throughout the poem to signal shifts - the mockingbird, unseen,  that is only known by its song, the woodpecker heard as an undertow and echo, and the others in the trees, until our gaze lands on the grave.

Madeline Tiger was born in New York City in 1934. Her family moved to Hewlett,NY on Long Island when she was 3 and then moved again to South Orange, New Jersey where she graduated from Columbia High School.

She graduated from Wellesley College, and received the Master of Arts in Teaching English from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1957. That summer, she began doctoral studies at Columbia University, but stopped when she began teaching high school English in the fall.

Madeline was the mother of five children. Her son Homer died in 1989, when he was 22, in a kayak accident in New Zealand.

"The Mockingbird in May" is from her book, The Atheist's Prayer. Her Birds of Sorrow and Joy: New and Selected Poems was published in 2003.

Madeline died on December 6, 2024 just weeks after her 90th birthday. 

 

Submission deadline: February 28, 2025

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Prompt: On the Anniversary of My Death

W.S. Merwin died on March 15, 2019. He died at home at the age of 91, in the house he built, among the thousands of palms he planted. In 1976, Merwin moved to Hawaii to study with Robert Aitken, a Zen Buddhist teacher. He married Paula Dunaway, in 1983, and settled on Maui. For over 40 years, they lived in a home that William designed and helped build, surrounded by acres of land once devastated and depleted from years of erosion, logging and toxic agricultural practices. Together, the Merwins painstakingly restored the land into one of the most comprehensive palm gardens in the world.

On the first anniversary of his death, I posted here a poem by Merwin titled "For the Anniversary of My Death" (from his collection The Second Four Books of Poems  

The poem begins: 

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day   

When the last fires will wave to me...

I found the idea in Merwin's poem of writing a poem that imagines what you would have to say on the anniversary of your death unique. It sounds like a depressing idea but there is the wonderful optimism in the poem of having passed that day every year without knowing it. 

Today might be the anniversary of my death, and considering that possibility, perhaps I should also be "bowing not knowing to what."

I have this quote on a card over my writing desk.

On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree

– W.S. Merwin

This month's writing prompt is to write a poem for the anniversary of your death. It could be the first anniversary or any year after. Who is the intended audience?  I think the prompt is more open to possibilities than the title might suggest at first. It could even be humorous.

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For the Anniversary of My Death by W.S. Merwin

“Poetry is a way of looking at the world for the first time.” ― W.S. Merwin

W.S. Merwin in 2010

W.S. Merwin died at home on March 15, 2019, at age 91.

I am probably not the only person who is thinking about him and reading him today and also remembering his poem, "For the Anniversary of My Death," which begins:

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

The idea that the day of your death is a day you have lived through over and over, like an anniversary, like a birthday, is another one of those things that W.S. Merwin has written about that has stayed with me.

I heard him read several times and I spoke very briefly to him about environmental issues in my home state of New Jersey. William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He was the son of a Presbyterian minister and as a 5-year-old in New Jersey, he wrote hymns for the Presbyterian church where his father served. He earned a scholarship to Princeton, where he also worked in the campus dining halls.

Later, he went on to Europe, where he became a translator and a poet.

If you are new to his work, an entry point might be The Essential W.S. Merwin.

In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing was influenced by Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he was a prolific poet and also was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.

“On the last day of the world

I would want to plant a tree”

― W. S. Merwin

1972 - Photograph by Douglas Kent Hall / ZUMA Press

“Send me out into another life

lord because this one is growing faint

I do not think it goes all the way”

― W.S. Merwin

Photo of Merwin on his farm in Maui by Jill Greenberg/Copper Canyon Press

The Poetry of Death

Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon

When death, as public as a President or as private as a lover, overwhelms us, it speaks itself in elegy’s necropoetics.

I recently read Donald Hall's article in The New Yorker, "The Poetry of Death." It sounds like a real downer, but I recommend that you give it a read.

Many readers of this blog probably know that Donald Hall was married to Jane Kenyon and that they shared a life of poetry.

Jane Kenyon and I almost avoided marriage because her widowhood would have been so long, between us was there such a radical difference in age. And yet today it is twenty-two years since she died, of leukemia, at forty-seven—and I approach ninety...

I heard the two of them talk about their shared life in poetry in a session at a Dodge Poetry Festival a few decades ago. That was before Jane was diagnosed with leukemia.

We inhabited not the natural world but the landscape of leukemia. I read a draft of “Without” to Jane. From her bed, Jane said, “You’ve got it, you’ve got it!” A year later, I put the poem into the past tense, and eventually it became the title of my book of Jane’s death.

But poets know that death plays a big role if poetry. It is aprt of poetry history and all poets eventually deal with the topic in their poems.

Poetry begins with elegy, in extremity, as Gilgamesh laments the death of his companion Enkidu, watching worms crawl out of Enkidu’s neck. Homer sings of heroes as they die in battle, and Priam weeps to see the body of his son Hector dragged around the walls of Troy. Virgil follows Aeneas from the graveyard of Troy to the founding of Rome, Dido’s pyre flaming on the way. In the fifteenth century, poetry emigrated from Chaucer’s England north to the Scots, where William Dunbar wrote his elegy for the makers—in Greek, a poet is a “maker”—and grieved over twenty-five dead and dying Scots poets.

         

Rumi on death

Death is a dialogue between me and myself.

No one else is interested in the discussion

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, known more popularly simply as Rumi was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, Islamic scholar, theologian, and Sufi mystic. His poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet" and the "best selling poet" in the United States.

I first encountered Rumi at a Dodge Poetry Festival through the translations by Coleman Barks. I was reading some poems randomly in The Essential Rumi today and noticed that I kept landing upon poems about death.

That sounds pretty depressing, but the poems are not grim. Here are two I found.



I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.

A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.

Workers rush toward some hint
of emptiness, which they then
start to fill. Their hope, though,
is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it. It contains
what you need!

This is how strange your fear of death
and emptiness is, and how perverse
the attachment to what you want.

No end, no end to the journey
no end, no end never.
How can the heart in love
ever stop opening.
If you love me,
you won’t just die once.
In every moment
you will die into me
to be reborn.

Into this new love, die.
Your way begins
on the other side
become the sky
take an axe to the prison wall,
escape
walk out like someone
suddenly born into color.
Do it now!

• Rumi Poetry
• Rumi Poems at Khamush
• A Tribute to Rumi

John Updike 1932-2009

March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

John Updike died today. He was 76.

I could write a lot about him. I have read almost all of his books. I bought and read every one of his novels. He was one of only a few writers that I would buy the new novel at its release without looking at a review and just read it.

My wife was also an Updike reader, so his novels were frequently a birthday gift for one of us.

I never got to teach any of his novels. I did regularly teach some of his poems and one of his early short stories, "A&P," that was in an anthology I used. It was a good adolescent tale of a boy who works in a supermarket who creates a moral dilemma for himself when the store's owner confronts three bikini-clad teenage girls who appear at his checkout station.

It's a simple story about a kid who takes a stand for something he believes is right and receives no praise or recognition for it.

My favorite works by him are his short stories.

I also like Updike's poetry which never received much attention. His most anthologized poem is probably "Ex-Basketball Player" but it's not really the best representation of his poetry or what he has written in the half century since it was published.

We used an Updike poem back in January 2006 as a writing prompt.

It was the poem "Dog's Death" from his Collected Poems 1953-1993.

I mentioned on the site that it's not sentimental, or comforting, or funny and wise. It's about death, loss, showing a kind of dignity in facing death, the death of the young, and that desire (thankfully) many of us seem to have (as in "A&P") to do the "right thing." I also see it as a poem about the inability of even love to triumph over death.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest's bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet's, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Updike wrote a second poem about this topic called "Another Dog’s Death" which you can read at this NPR site which is part of a series called "The End of Life: Exploring Death in America."

I met him twice at readings. The first time, I was a new college grad and carried the original paperback edition of his story collection Pigeon Feathers to get signed. He asked me how I had come to own it, since I was too young to have bought it new.

I told him that I bought it in a used book store and showed him a note that was inside the book when I bought it. The note was scribbled on back of an airport receipt for the book's purchase. "call. pick up boxes," it said. There was also a paycheck stub. "There's the start of a story," Updike said. I replied that I actually had written a story from that idea. He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. "I'd like to see it," he said.

I mailed him the story and a week later received a postcard reply typed on a manual typewriter. It's as close to having something in The New Yorker as I have ever come.

It saddens me that John Updike never received the Nobel Prize in Literature during his lifetime. What a lifetime body of work - more than twenty-five novels, more than a dozen short story collections, poetry, non-fiction including art criticism, literary criticism, children's books, and hundreds of stories, reviews, and poems in The New Yorker where he first was accepted in 1954.

"Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time. Under the pear trees, in Paradise."
John Updike, Rabbit at Rest

Books by John Updike

The Thirst of Mary Oliver

An evening of poetry with some friends this past week sent me looking into the poems of Mary Oliver again.

In Oliver's newest book, Thirst, there are 43 new poems. You'd expect to find poems about nature, and readers familiar with her work might also expect a kind of spirituality. As several reviewers have written, you will also find her exploring in this book grief and faith.

I returned to reading Oliver's poems after my friend, Leon, talked about how approaching her poems recently had been a kind of spiritual reading. Oliver recently lost her long time companion, and in this book she writes through and with her grief into a place that seems overtly spiritual, perhaps even religious.

Some of the poems sound like prayers-

Oh Lord of melons, of mercy, though I am
not ready, nor worthy, I am climbing toward you.

and in the poem, "Praying" she offers:

It doesn't have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice can speak.

Patching a few words together into a prayer, or into a poem (I have long believed that almost all poems touch upon the writing of poetry) is, as she writes early in the book, her doing her life's work - "loving the world."

And the poems are still full of place: ponds, ocean and marsh full of "salt brightness," grass, fields and cattails occupied by herons, ravens, dogs, bees, hawks, snakes, turtles, and bears.

My other poetic companion last week, Susan, might call these Oliver's signature tropes (as Susan is currently deep into a thesis on the topic). That's not a bad path into the poems either, but I might have to walk down several definition roads to see tropes linguistically, as in music, philosophy or in the most obvious literary meaning.

As she spends a "Long Afternoon at the Edge of Little Sister Pond," Oliver writes:

Every day I walk out into the world
to be dazzled, then to be reflective

For me, these poems are a kind of natural praying. They are natural in the sense of nature, full of wonder and admiration for the majesty of what surrounds us, and they are natural in their inherent sense of right and wrong and their higher qualities of human nature.

Belief isn't always easy.
But this much I have learned—
if not enough else—
to live with my eyes open.
I know what everyone wants
is a miracle.
This wasn't a miracle.
Unless, of course, kindness—

as now and again
some rare person has suggested—
is a miracle.
As surely it is.

For August, we ask for our new writing prompt that you try to write a natural prayer. You may use any definition of natural, any form of prayer, whether that be overtly religious or spiritual without any religious attachments. This term, "natural prayer," is not my own invention - Celan said: "Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul," so there are precedents for this type of poem.

If you have examples of poets who have written poems of this type, post a link in the comments below for others to follow.



Information on this writing prompt and poem submission is at poetsonline.org

John Updike's "Dog's Death"

This month we considered the poem "Dog's Death" from John Updike's Collected Poems 1953-1993 (Knopf) as the model but I didn't originally mean to have everyone submit poems about dogs or other pets or even exclusively poems about death.

I mentioned on the site that it's not a sentimental poem. I wouldn't give it to a friend on the occasion of their pet's death as consolation. It's not about a funny and wise pet like Mark Doty's "Golden Retrievals".

It's certainly about death, loss, showing a kind of dignity in facing death, the death of the young, this desire many of us seem to have (thank goodness) to do the "right thing".

I personally look at it as a poem about the inability of even love to triumph over death - "Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her / Nevertheless she sank".

Updike wrote a second poem about this topic called "Another Dog’s Death" (also in his Collected Poems) which begins like this:

For days the good old bitch had been dying, her back
pinched down to the spine and arched to ease the pain,
her kidneys dry, her muzzle white. At last
I took a shovel into the woods and dug her grave

in preparation for the certain. She came along,
which I had not expected..."

You can read the entire poem at this National Public Radio site which is part of a series called "The End of Life: Exploring Death in America" that they did. There are other readings there which I think you will find interesting, not only for this prompt but for yourself.

About Updike - Ernest Hilbert in a review of Updike's Americana: and other poems says:

"John Updike balances upon, and in many ways defines, the center of the beam in American literature. While maintaining a highly literary elan and readership, he has managed to avoid the obscurity and ostentation associated with "highbrow" authors...

As a poet, Updike is thought of primarily as a practitioner of Light Verse, a term bestowed as often to insult as to categorize a poet, catching up in its loose netting a variety of brightly-colored fish: verse de société, parody, epitaph, clerihew, occasional verse, anything unconcerned with love, beauty, death, formal experimentalism, the stuff (or stuffing as is often the case) of serious poetry (even the designation "verse" is meant to be a bit contemptuous, the yield of poetaster rather than poet). Wit, cleverness, and breezy elegance define the genre, and in these métiers Updike is gifted, to be sure, but he has never been limited to such.

Amid his Nashian poems of the past four decades, there were innumerable moments of incredible grace and depth. For instance, his poem 'Dog's Death', though rarely anthologized, is recognized as that unusual thing, a genuinely sad poem. It brinks at every turn the slope of sentimentality that drops down into the chasm of maudlin corniness, but it manages to hold its footing... It is perhaps one of the rare times that a reader might apply the description "sentimental" without intending harm to poem or poet. "

I like Updike's lighter verse too. Here's a small sample:

Sunday Rain

The window screen
is trying to do
its crossword puzzle
but appears to know
only vertical words.

which reminds me of something that Richard Brautigan might have written.

So, this month's prompt is asking for you to put form to any of the themes mentioned above, and to follow its rather wide road without driving into the dark woods you are passing through.