Paul Howe's Classes

STEPHEN DUNN

Beyond Hammonton

Night is longing, longing, longing,
beyond all endurance.
—Henry Miller

The back roads I’ve traveled late

at night, alone, a little drunk,

wishing I were someone

on whom nothing is lost,

are the roads by day I take

to the car wash in Hammonton

or to Blue Anchor’s

lawnmower repair shop

when the self-propel mechanism goes.

Fascinating how the lamplight

that’s beckoned

from solitary windows

gives way to white shutters

and occasionally a woman

in her yard, bending over

something conspicuously in bloom.

So much then is duty, duty, duty,

and so much

with the sun visor tilted

and destination known

can be endured.

But at night . . . no, even at night

so much can be endured.

I’ve known only one man

who left the road,

followed an intriguing light

to its source.

He told me

that he knocked many times

before it became clear to him

he must break down the door.

--Stephen Dunn

Coming Home, Garden State Parkway

Tonight the toll booth men are
congratulating the weather,
wishing me well. I'm all thank you's

and confusion, I don't know what

kind of conspiracy this is.
Then at Howard Johnson's
the pretty cashier apologizes
for the price of coffee. She wants me

to drive carefully, to think of her
on the dark, straight road.
Does she say these things to everyone?
I've done nothing different

and in the mirror
there's the same old face
not even lovers have called handsome,
the same mouth that belies

absolute conviction.
I'm alone, and maybe
there's an underworld of those alone
and maybe tonight I've entered it--

the instant, safe intimacy
guaranteed to move on.
On the car radio
comes a noisy current song

and then an old, melodic lie
about love.
Afterwards, the disc jockey
speaks to all of us on the road,

he wants us to understand
the danger of the other man,
watch out, he says, for the blind side.
I'm going 70, the winter outside

is without snow, it's hard anymore
to be sure about anything.
Next toll station, I feel for a quarter--
the exact change

but I swerve
(as I knew I would)
to the woman holding out her hand.
She neither smiles nor speaks;

I try to believe
she's shy.
I'd like to put my hand in her hand,
to keep alive

this strange human streak I'm on.
But there's only money between us,
silver and flesh
meeting in a familiar goodbye.

--Stephen Dunn

JOHN CIARDI

The Catalpa

The catalpa’s white week is ending there

in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full

of its own flowering now, but the least air

spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall

whole coronations. There is not much more

of what this is. Is every gladness quick?

That tree’s a nuisance, really. Long before

the summer’s out, its beans, long as a stick,

will start to shed. And every year one limb

cracks without falling off and hangs there dead

till I get up and risk my neck to trim

what it knows how to lose but not to shed.

I keep it only for this one white pass.

The end of June’s its garden; July, its Fall;

all else, the world remembering what it was

in the seven days of its visible miracle.

What should I keep if averages were all?

The Bird in Whatever Name

A bird with a name it does not itself

recognize, and I cannot recall

if ever I knew it, and no matter

lives off the great gross Rhinoceros of Africa.

The slathering hide of the great gross Rhinoceros,

slabbed like a river in a stiff wind,

is rancid at the bent seams, and clogged

with lice and fly-grubs at the pores and pittings.

The Rhino-bird, whatever its unknown name,

attends its warty barge through the jungle,

the feast of its own need picking the tickle

of many small corruptions from behemoth

who, impervious to all roarers, is yet defenseless, alone,

against the whine of the fly in his ear, and stricken

to helpless furies by the squirm of the uncoiling grub

tucked into the soft creases of the impenetrable.

My bird-and oh it is my bird and yours!-crawls

him as kissingly as saints their god, springs

circling over him to foretell all coming,

descends in the calm lapses to ride a-perch on his horn

or snout. Even into the mouth and nares of the beast

he goes-so some have reported-to pick infection

from power. And can the beast not love

the bird that comes to him with songs and mercies?

-Oh jungle, jungle, in whose ferns life dreamed itself

and woke, saw itself and was, looked back

and found in every bird and beast its feature,

told of itself, whatever name is given.

--John Ciardi

Snowy Heron

What lifts the heron leaning on the air
I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare,
a long stroke through the cumulus of trees,
a shaped thought at the sky — then gone. O rare!
Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees,
would have cried Father! Cry anything you please

But praise. By any name or none. But praise
the white original burst that lights
the heron on his two soft kissing kites.
When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,
I sit by pond scums till the air recites
Its heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.

--John Ciardi

Poem

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot.

-- William Carlos Williams

The Great Figure

Among the rain

and lights

I saw the figure 5

in gold

on a red

firetruck

moving

tense

unheeded

to gong clangs

siren howls

and wheels rumbling

through the dark city.

--William Carlos Williams

From Book I, Paterson (published from 1946-1958)

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls

its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He

lies on his right side, head near the thunder

of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,

his dreams walk about the city where he persists

incognito. Butterflies settle on his stone ear.

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom

seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations

drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river

animate a thousand automations. Who because they

neither know their sources nor the sills of their

disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly

for the most part,

locked and forgot in their desires-unroused.

—Say it, no ideas but in things—

nothing but the blank faces of the houses

and cylindrical trees

bent, forked by preconception and accident—

split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—

secret—into the body of the light!

From above, higher than the spires, higher

even than the office towers, from oozy fields

abandoned to gray beds of dead grass,

black sumac, withered weed-stalks,

mud and thickets cluttered with dead leaves-

the river comes pouring in above the city

and crashes from the edge of the gorge

in a recoil of spray and rainbow mists-

(What common language to unravel?

. . .combed into straight lines

from that rafter of a rock's

lip.)

A man like a city and a woman like a flower

—who are in love. Two women. Three women.

Innumerable women, each like a flower.

But

only one man—like a city.

--William Carlos Williams

Gulf Music

Mallah walla tella bella. Trah mah trah-la, la-la-la,

Mah la belle. Ippa Fano wanna bella, wella-wah.

The hurricane of September 8, I900 devastated

Galveston, Texas. Some 8,ooo people died.

The Pearl City almost obliterated. Still the one worst

Calamity in American history, Woh mallah-walla.

Eight years later Morris Eisenberg sailing from Lubeck

Entered the States through the still-wounded port of Galveston.

i908, eeloo hotesy, hotesy-ahnoo, hotesy ahnoo mi-Mizraim.

Or you could say "Morris" was his name. A Moshe.

Ippa Fano wanna bella woh. The New Orleans musician called

Professor Longhair was named Henry Roeland Byrd.

Not heroic not nostalgic not learned. Made-up names:

Hum a few bars and we'll homme-la-la. Woh ohma-dallah.

Longhair or Henry and his wife Alice joined the Civil Defense

Special Forces 714. Alice was a Colonel, he a Lieutenant.

Here they are in uniforms and caps, pistols in holsters.

Hotesy anno, Ippa Fano trah ma dollah, tra la.

Morris took the name "Eisenberg" after the rich man from

His shtetl who in I908 owned a town in Arkansas.

Most of this is made up, but the immigration papers did

Require him to renounce all loyalty to Czar Nicholas.

As he signed to that, he must have thought to himself

The Yiddish equivalent of No Problem, Mah la

Hotesy hotesy-ahno. Wella-mallah widda dallah,

Mah fanna-well. A townful of people named Eisenberg.

The past is not decent or orderly, it is made-up and devious.

The man was correct when he said it's not even past.

Look up at the waters from the causeway where you stand:

Lime causeway made of grunts and halfway-forgettings

On a foundation of crushed oyster shells. Roadbed

Paved with abandonments, shored up by haunts.

Becky was a teenager married to an older man. After she

Met Morris, in I9IO or so, she swapped Eisenbergs.

They rode out of Arkansas on his motorcycle, well-ah-way.

Wed-away. "Mizraim" is Egypt, I remember that much.

The storm bulldozed Galveston with a great rake of debris,

In the September heat the smell of the dead was unbearable.

Hotesy ahnoo. "Professor" the New Orleans title

For any piano player. He had a Caribbean left hand,

A boogie-woogie right. Civil Defense Special Forces 7I4

Organized for disasters, mainly hurricanes. Floods.

New Orleans style borrowing this and that, ah wail-ah-way la-la,

They probably got "7I4" from Joe Friday's badge number

On Dragnet. Jack Webb chose the number in memory

Of Babe Ruth's 714 home runs, the old record.

As living memory of the great hurricanes of the thirties

And the fifties dissolved, Civil Defense Forces 714

Also dissolved, washed away for well or ill - yet nothing

Ever entirely abandoned though generations forget, and ah

Well the partial forgetting embellishes everything all the more:

Alla-mallah, mi-Mizraim, try my tra-la, hotesy-totesy.

Dollars, dolors. Callings and contrivances. King Zulu. Comus.

Sephardic ju-ju and verses. Voodoo mojo, Special Forces.

Henry formed a group named Professor Longhair and his

Shuffling Hungarians. After so much renunciation

And invention, is this the image of the promised end?

All music haunted by all the music of the dead forever.

Becky haunted forever by Pearl the daughter she abandoned

For love, 0 try my tra-la-la, ma la belle, mah walla-woe.

--Robert Pinsky

The Shirt

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,

The nearly invisible stitches along the collar

Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break

Or talking money or politics while one fitted

This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,

The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,

The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.

One hundred and forty-six died in the flames

On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes—

The witness in a building across the street

Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step

Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.

And then another. As if he were helping them up

To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms

Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held

Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped to the sill himself, his jacket flared

And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,

Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers—

Like Hart Crane’s Bedlamite, “shrill shirt ballooning.”

Wonderful how the pattern matches perfectly

Across the placket and over the twin bar-tacked

Corners of both pockets, like a strict rhyme

Or a major chord. Prints, plaids, checks,

Houndstooth, Tattersall, Madras. The clan tartans

Invented by mill-owners inspired by the hoax of Ossian,

To control their savage Scottish workers, tamed

By a fabricated heraldry: MacGregor,

Bailey, MacMartin. The kilt, devised for workers

To wear among the dusty clattering looms.

Weavers, carders, spinners. The loader,

The docker, the navvy. The planter, the picker, the sorter

Sweating at her machine in a litter of cotton

As slaves in calico headrags sweated in fields:

George Herbert, your descendant is a Black

Lady in South Carolina, her name is Irma

And she inspected my shirt. Its color and fit

And feel and its clean smell have satisfied

Both her and me. We have culled its cost and quality

Down to the buttons of simulated bone,

The buttonholes, the sizing, the facing, the characters

Printed in black on neckband and tail. The shape,

The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

--Robert Pinsky

Nick Virgilio

lily:

out of the water . . .

out of itself

Bass

picking bugs

off the moon

my spring love affair:

the old upright Remington

wears a new ribbon

on the other end

of the kite—

a pigtailed girl

my father and I

with no footprints to follow

step into deep snow

flag-covered coffin:

the shadow of the buler

slips into the grave

no autumn moon

to hang

a verse on

Insect Life of Florida

In those days I thought their endless thrum

was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.

In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells

enameled hard as the sky before the rain.

All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe

through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever

parceled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid

Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled

to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she

murmured of alligators that float the rivers

able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.

And always the trance of blacktop shimmering

through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand

and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding

white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

until I was lost, until I was part

of the singing, their thousand wings gauze

on my body, tattooing my skin.

Father rocked me later by the water,

the motel balcony, singing calypso

with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

a net over the sea, its lesson

of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed

over his shoes, over the rail

where the citronella burned merging our

shadows—Father’s face floating over mine

in the black changing sound

of night, the enormous Florida night,

metallic with cicadas, musical

and dangerous as the human heart.

--Lynda Hull

Chinese New Year

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows

pasted with colored squares, past the man

who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past

crates of doves and roosters veiled

until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets

with sulphur as people exchange gold

and silver foil, money to appease ghosts

who linger, needy even in death. I am

almost invisible. Hands could pass through me

effortlessly. This is how it is

to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows

untranslatable as the shop signs,

the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle

in the stairwell, the corridor where

the doors are blue months ajar. Hands

gesture in the smoke, the partial moon

oof a face. For hours the soft numeric

click of mah-jongg tiles drifts

down the hallway where languid Mai trails

her musk of sex and narcotics.

There is no grief in this, only the old year

consuming itself, the door knob blazing

in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel.

Between voices and fireworks

wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush—

no language I want to learn. I can touch

the sill worn by hands I’ll never know

in this room with its low table

where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign

for Jade Palace sheds green corollas

on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here

in the chastening glow, darkening

my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest

of my life widening away from me, waiting

for the man I married to pass beneath

the sign of the building, to climb

the five flights and say his Chinese name for me.

He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets

where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where

the new year is liquor, the black bottle

the whole district is waiting for, like

some benevolent arrest—the moment

when men and women turn to each other and dissolve

each bad bet, every sly mischance,

the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight

the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway.

He brings fish. He brings lotus root.

He brings me ghost money.

--Lynda Hull

Star Ledger

Almost time to dress for the sun’s total eclipse
        so the child pastes one last face
in her album of movie stars–Myrna Loy
        and Olivia de Havilland–names meant to conjure
sultry nights, voluptuous turns across
        some dance floor borne on clouds. Jean Harlow.

Clipped from the Newark evening paper, whole galaxies
        of splendid starlets gaze, fixed to violet pages
spread drying on the kitchen table. The child whispers
        their names when she tests “lorgnettes”
made that morning out of shirtboards, old film
        negatives gleaned from her grandmother’s hat box.

Through phony opera glasses, hall lights blur
        stained sepia above her, and her grandmother’s
room is stained by a tall oak’s crown, yellow
        in the window. Acorns crack against asphalt
three floors down. The paper promised
        “a rare conjunction of sun and moon and earth.”

Her grandmother brushed thick gray hair.
        Cut glass bottles and jewel cases.
Above the corset her back was soft, black moles
        she called her “melanomas” dusted across
powdery skin like a night sky, inside out.
        The Spanish fan dangles from her wrist

and when she stands she looks like an actress
        from the late-night movies. The child sifts
costume brooches, glass rubies and sapphires,
        to find the dark gold snake ring with emerald chips
for eyes. She carries the miniature hourglass
        to the sagging porch, then waiting turns it over

and over. Uncertain in high heels, she teeters
        and the shawl draped flamenco-style keeps sliding off
her shoulder, so she glances up the block to Girl Scouts
        reeling down the flag. The child hates their dull uniforms,
how they scatter shrieking through leafsmoke and the sheen
        of fallen chestnuts. She touches the ring, heavy

on a ribbon circling her neck, then thinks she’ll sew
        the album pages with green embroidery silk.
Her grandmother snaps the fan and they raise lorgnettes
        to the sun’s charcoaled face, its thin wreath
of fire. Quiet, the Girl Scouts bow their heads–sleek
        Italian ones and black girls with myriad tight braids.

Streetlights hum on, then the towers of Manhattan flare
        beyond the river. The earth must carve its grave ellipse
through desert space, through years and histories
        before it will cross with sun and moon this way again.
Minor starlets in the child’s album will fade and tatter,
        fleeting constellations with names flimsy as

the shawl that wraps her shoulders. She’ll remember this
        as foolish. The girls by the flag will mostly leave
for lives of poverty, crippled dreams, and Newark
        will collapse to burn like another dying star.
But none of this has happened. Afternoon has stilled
        with the eclipse that strips them of their shadows,

so each one stands within their own brief human orbit
while the world reverses, then slowly, recovers.

--Lynda Hull

GREGORY PARDLO

I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet

whispering my name. I was born to rainwater and lye;

I was born across the river where I

was borrowed with clothespins, a harrow tooth,

broadsides sewn in my shoes. I returned, though

it please you, through no fault of my own,

pockets filled with coffee grounds and eggshells.

I was born still and superstitious; I bore an unexpected burden.

I gave birth, I gave blessing, I gave rise to suspicion.

I was born abandoned outdoors in the heat-shaped air,

air drifting like spirits and old windows.

I was born a fraction and a cipher and a ledger entry;

I was an index of first lines when I was born.

I was born waist-deep stubborn in the water crying

ain’t I a woman and a brother I was born

to this hall of mirrors, this horror story I was

born with a prologue of references, pursued

by mosquitoes and thieves, I was born passing

off the problem of the twentieth century: I was born.

I read minds before I could read fishes and loaves;

I walked a piece of the way alone before I was born.

--Gregory Pardlo

Double Dutch

The girls turning double-dutch

bob & weave like boxers pulling

punches, shadowing each other,

sparring across the slack cord

casting parabolas in the air. They

whip quick as an infant’s pulse

and the jumper, before she

enters the winking, nods in time

as if she has a notion to share,

waiting her chance to speak. But she’s

anticipating the upbeat

like a bandleader counting off

the tune they are about to swing into.

The jumper stair-steps into mid-air

as if she’s jumping rope in low-gravity,

training for a lunar mission. Airborne a moment

long enough to fit a second thought in,

she looks caught in the mouth bones of a fish

as she flutter-floats into motion

like a figure in a stack of time-lapse photos

thumbed alive. Once inside,

the bells tied to her shoestrings rouse the gods

who’ve lain in the dust since the Dutch

acquired Manhattan. How she dances

patterns like a dust-heavy bee retracing

its travels in scale before the hive. How

the whole stunning contraption of girl and rope

slaps and scoops like a paddle boat.

Her misted skin arranges the light

with each adjustment and flex. Now heather-

hued, now sheen, light listing on the fulcrum

of a wrist and the bare jutted joints of elbow

and knee, and the faceted surfaces of muscle,

surfaces fracturing and reforming

like a sun-tickled sleeve of running water.

She makes jewelry of herself and garlands

the ground with shadows.

--Gregory Pardlo

Corsons Inlet

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

to the sea,

then turned right along

the surf

rounded a naked headland

and returned

along the inlet shore:

it was muggy sunny, the wind from the sea steady and high,

crisp in the running sand,

some breakthroughs of sun

but after a bit

continuous overcast:

the walk liberating, I was released from forms,

from the perpendiculars,

straight lines, blocks, boxes, binds

of thought

into the hues, shadings, rises, flowing bends and blends

of sight:

I allow myself eddies of meaning:

yield to a direction of significance

running

like a stream through the geography of my work:

you can find

in my sayings

swerves of action

like the inlet’s cutting edge:

there are dunes of motion,

organizations of grass, white sandy paths of remembrance

in the overall wandering of mirroring mind:

but Overall is beyond me: is the sum of these events

I cannot draw, the ledger I cannot keep, the accounting

beyond the account:

in nature there are few sharp lines: there are areas of

primrose

more or less dispersed;

disorderly orders of bayberry; between the rows

of dunes,

irregular swamps of reeds,

though not reeds alone, but grass, bayberry, yarrow, all ...

predominantly reeds:

I have reached no conclusions, have erected no boundaries,

shutting out and shutting in, separating inside

from outside: I have

drawn no lines:

manifold events of sand

change the dune’s shape that will not be the same shape

tomorrow,

so I am willing to go along, to accept

the becoming

thought, to stake off no beginnings or ends, establish

no walls:

by transitions the land falls from grassy dunes to creek

to undercreek: but there are no lines, though

change in that transition is clear

as any sharpness: but “sharpness” spread out,

allowed to occur over a wider range

than mental lines can keep:

the moon was full last night: today, low tide was low:

black shoals of mussels exposed to the risk

of air

and, earlier, of sun,

waved in and out with the waterline, waterline inexact,

caught always in the event of change:

a young mottled gull stood free on the shoals

and ate

to vomiting: another gull, squawking possession, cracked a crab,

picked out the entrails, swallowed the soft-shelled legs, a ruddy

turnstone running in to snatch leftover bits:

risk is full: every living thing in

siege: the demand is life, to keep life: the small

white blacklegged egret, how beautiful, quietly stalks and spears

the shallows, darts to shore

to stab—what? I couldn’t

see against the black mudflats—a frightened

fiddler crab?

the news to my left over the dunes and

reeds and bayberry clumps was

fall: thousands of tree swallows

gathering for flight:

an order held

in constant change: a congregation

rich with entropy: nevertheless, separable, noticeable

as one event,

not chaos: preparations for

flight from winter,

cheet, cheet, cheet, cheet, wings rifling the green clumps,

beaks

at the bayberries

a perception full of wind, flight, curve,

sound:

the possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness:

the “field” of action

with moving, incalculable center:

in the smaller view, order tight with shape:

blue tiny flowers on a leafless weed: carapace of crab:

snail shell:

pulsations of order

in the bellies of minnows: orders swallowed,

broken down, transferred through membranes

to strengthen larger orders: but in the large view, no

lines or changeless shapes: the working in and out, together

and against, of millions of events: this,

so that I make

no form of

formlessness:

orders as summaries, as outcomes of actions override

or in some way result, not predictably (seeing me gain

the top of a dune,

the swallows

could take flight—some other fields of bayberry

could enter fall

berryless) and there is serenity:

no arranged terror: no forcing of image, plan,

or thought:

no propaganda, no humbling of reality to precept:

terror pervades but is not arranged, all possibilities

of escape open: no route shut, except in

the sudden loss of all routes:

I see narrow orders, limited tightness, but will

not run to that easy victory:

still around the looser, wider forces work:

I will try

to fasten into order enlarging grasps of disorder, widening

scope, but enjoying the freedom that

Scope eludes my grasp, that there is no finality of vision,

that I have perceived nothing completely,

that tomorrow a new walk is a new walk.

--A. R. Ammons

Coming Clearing

A clarifying high

wind in October's

shanky last days -

maples luminous

mounds or

glacial hills dressed

down shiny to outline:

and thickets

only darkness could travel

in, clearly

keeping nothing worth

looking for: October

winds change things,

from

the scarlet of

frost-scorched boughs

to whistling gray

branch and clatter,

readying plenty of

clarification

coming ice can seal.

--A.R. Ammons

Paul Howe's Classes

Tuesday, April 7, 2026

Short Stories of Jacob Appel

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

Poetry in Two Directions: The Palindromes of Barry Duncan

Friday, February 20, 2026

SHORT STORIES OF JACOB APPELL

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

BEETHOVEN'S SYMPHONY NO. 6 "PASTORAL": A PLAYLIST

Friday, May 13, 2022

EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED: SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

Saturday, November 13, 2021

NEW JERSEY POETS