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Five poems to make you swoon
For National Poetry Month, selections from new books by Anne Carson, Charles Wright and others.

[04/14/00]

Reviews
"Ravelstein" by Saul Bellow
The Nobel laureate offers a fictional portrait of his gay friend Allan Bloom -- and of the erotic fulfillment he himself found late in life.
By Lorin Stein
[04/14/00]

Soul of the suburbs
From "American Beauty" to the New York Times, those who satirize and celebrate the burbs seldom understand how they got the way they are.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[04/13/00]

Reviews
"The Custom of the Sea" by Neil Hanson and "In the Heart of the Sea" by Nathaniel Philbrick
Two new books serve up hair-raising histories of maritime cannibalism with all the gory details.
By Mark Schone
[04/13/00]

Minds wide shut
A new book makes the CIA's Cold War skulduggery look upright compared with the self-deceptions of the intellectuals who were on the agency's payroll.
By Robert S. Boynton
[04/12/00]

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I, too, am a hoarder of such mementos, and my collection includes a small, tattered paperback that I got in fifth grade, when I really fell in love for the first time -- with poetry.

First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems that Captivated and Inspired Them Edited by Carmela Ciuraru Scribner, 259 pages Nonfiction Also Today Five poems to make you swoon

The book is called "On City Streets" and it sold for a whopping 75 cents. Its cover has a photo of a boy sitting in the street, drawing with chalk, and the book is subtitled "A Remarkable Collection of Poems and Photographs That Captures the Heart and Soul of the City and Its people." In the pages of this anthology, I discovered a poem by someone named Patricia Hubbell that enchanted me in a way nothing ever had before:

"Joralemon Street"

We walked in the street on Joralemon Street.
(Geraniums white and geraniums pink
Brightened the flats on Joralemon Street.)
The sun rode the brownstones
A short pace away.
And turned before setting the night on the day
To wave us a shadow that banded the street.
(Geraniums guarded Joralemon Street.)
He slid from the housetops
And hurried away
Leaving night in his place on the husk of the day,
And we walked in the shadows along the dark street
And knew how geraniums smell in the dusk.

The poem's primary fascination for me was the word "Joralemon," which I pronounced (incorrectly) "JOR-a-LE-mon," like the citrus fruit. I didn't know and didn't care where this street was, or even if it was real -- it existed in my head.

But, as is the case with all objects of affection, the mystery was due to unravel at some point. Years later, exiting the subway in Brooklyn, N.Y., to visit one of my other first loves, a boy this time, I found myself on Joralemon Street. I can't help thinking that this was no coincidence. The odd thing was that the poem came back instantly, overpowering the reality of what was in front of me. It was winter, but I could almost smell geraniums in the air. Though I hadn't opened it in some time, I had held onto "On City Streets," and I've continued to cart it around since, feeling that its presence in the many homes I've made is somehow essential to my existence not only as a poet but as a person. Though "Joralemon Street" isn't the best poem ever written, not by a long shot, it's a marker of my entry into language. Even now, when I should supposedly know better, when I read Rainer Maria Rilke and T.S. Eliot and I know how to pronounce "Jo-RAL-emon," I can't quite seem to get over it -- the mark of a truly searing affair.

These, then, were my beginnings as a writer, and in light of this rather humble first love of mine, I was nothing short of delighted when I received a copy of "First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems that Captivated and Inspired Them," edited by Carmela Ciuraru. Amid the crashing din of National Poetry Month, when publishing houses produce a small landslide of new books, many of them quite wonderful, but far too many to pay attention to all at once, what a joy to be presented with this one, modest book that gets right to the heart of the matter. It responds to the eternal question, the one that always pops up at readings: How do great poets start to become poets? Who, and where, were they when they felt those early stirrings of verse?

There are, of course, any number of false, pretentious ways to answer this question. Often people who have been in the limelight for a long time lose their capacity to come out of it, even for a moment. Amazingly, however, Ciuraru has coaxed some of the world's most revered poets into admitting that they didn't spring from the womb reciting Shakespeare and Shelley and Stevens. Even those who did have the presence of mind to fall in love with great poets right off the bat are not entirely sure why it happened.

Next page | Who says "The Lady Is a Tramp" isn't poetry?