March 2006
Two Poems by Sean Norton
Listen to "Sage Wisdom" mp3  (requires audio plugin)
Sage Wisdom
"It's true," you think,
"a wise person does well
in life, and a fool
does poorly."
Then again, it's six of one,
half dozen of another
when it comes to shame.
All those things you couldn't live with
are people now,
oddly in a circle
as you asked them,
huddled clumsily.
You tell them
you want this to work, this alternative
dance class at the women's center
in Portland, Oregon,
one part Tai Chi, one part Yoga,
one part African Dance.
You want them
to be here, alert, these beginners,
but you don't feel it
or see it when you look
into their eyes.
You want them to be
the soft rising
of feathers on a heat vent,
the power of the diving halcyon,
knowing its circle of impact,
to be the fish it has
so mercifully taken.
You want that suffering
in their bellies
to come alive in Dance,
but again, they have let you down
with awkward aim
and no grace.
This pep talk goes on
for fifteen minutes,
until one of the students,
it doesn't matter which one,
wishing you weren't so uptight,
says something akin to,
one could learn a lot
from a failure.
Then, as you look
at those few faces that aren't
hung down
like the rest, you think,
"You never know
what loser is going to
come out with
sage wisdom,"
and you find you can
only step out of this circle
half-way, half begin
to live with this.
Blue Tips
Listen to "Blue Tips" mp3 (requires audio plugin)
In nature there always seems to be some time to waste.
I played with Ohio Blue Tips waiting for the tea to boil.
Fire was a surprise. Fire is a surprise. Being so distinct it can only be itself,
not earth not water not air. Being so itself it is quietly indestructible.
Like Bergman's The Virgin Spring, with a blue film cast over it, the pines
the grass the picnic table black and white and blue. Oh the
indestructible Max von Sydow
after the dull-witted thugs unable to comprehend his daughter's beauty
after the slaying builds a church to the God beyond suffering.
Max von Sydow continually building and rebuilding.
There is a blue fire in a man who must remake his ability to live,
cursed by both the action beyond his control and his own action. Silence,
that absence, is an action, a space qualified with implosion, fire.
Where does the heart go when it caves in, where does the mind go?
Raw material for the woodland cathedral that's superior to the city,
made with the exact earth where loss ruled and bit down the innocent wildly.
I'd be surprised now to sense it where we walk though the forest is capacious.
We miss renewal below the needle blanket and fern floor.
Quickly, quickly, we need the consolation in fire-treated stone.
Urgency is flattened as time goes rolling on, the weight of it.
But time too goes up in blue flame by the hour.
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| Photo by Robert Keiffer |
Sean Norton grew up in Rochester, NY, and received his BA from the University of Oregon "after a couple of false starts at other schools." He enrolled in U-M's Creative Writing Program in 1999, and upon completing his MFA in poetry he worked in the Classics department for several months before being appointed assistant director of the Creative Writing Program last year.
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Bad With Faces |
Last year also saw the publication of Norton's first book of poems, Bad With Faces (Red Morning Press, Washington, DC, $11.95).
Former U-M faculty member and poet Alice Fulton calls Norton's poetry "spiritual and gorgeous" and says Bad With Faces "is infused with a wry wit that in no ways undermines its high seriousness. How spacious—and sweetly odd—is the sensibility behind these mindful and surprising poems! I'm deeply impressed by Sean Norton's subtle workings of surface and depth, his ironic-gentle encounters with what-is.
On his Web site, Norton lists his occupation as "events planner." And if you assume that the title of his book means there's a poem called "Bad With Faces" inside—the conventional practice—you won't find one. He says he was mulling over possible titles over a sushi dinner with fellow writer Margaret Dean, and told her that most of the poems were about "people struggling with the surface of things."
"She all of a sudden shouted out, 'Bad With Faces,' and I liked it," Norton recalls.
Michigan Today Poetry Archive >
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