PennSound Daily (original) (raw)

With the US celebrating Thanksgiving this week, it's time to revisit a perennial PennSound Daily tradition that started way back in 2010: a mini-mix of poems of thanks and thanksgiving — some old, some new — taken from the PennSound archives.

In a classic recording of "Thanksgiving" [MP3] from the St. Mark's Poetry Project, Joe Brainard wonders "what, if anything Thanksgiving Day really means to me." Emptying his mind of thoughts, he comes up with these free associations: "first is turkey, second is cranberry sauce and third is pilgrims."

"I want to give my thanks to everyone for everything," the late John Giorno tells us in "Thanx 4 Nothing" [MP3], "and as a token of my appreciation, / I want to offer back to you all my good and bad habits / as magnificent priceless jewels, / wish-fulfilling gems satisfying everything you need and want, / thank you, thank you, thank you, / thanks." The rolicking poem that ensues offers both genuine sensory delights ("may all the chocolate I've ever eaten / come back rushing through your bloodstream / and make you feel happy.") and sarcastic praise ("America, thanks for the neglect, / I did it without you, / let us celebrate poetic justice, / you and I never were, / never tried to do anything, / and never succeeded").

"Can beauty save us?" wonders Maggie Nelson in "Thanksgiving" [MP3], a standout poem from her marvelous collection, Something Bright, Then Holes, which revels in the holiday's darker edges and simplest truths: "After dinner / I sit the cutest little boy on my knee / and read him a book about the history of cod // absentmindedly explaining overfishing, / the slave trade. People for rum? he asks, / incredulously. Yes, I nod. People for rum."

Yusef Komunyakaa gratefully recounts a number of near-misses in Vietnam — "the tree / between me & a sniper's bullet [...] the dud / hand grenade tossed at my feet / outside Chu Lai" — in "Thanks" [MP3], from a 1998 reading at the Kelly Writers House.

"I miss everything / all the time, even / what's in front of me," Kate Colby reflects in "Home to Thanksgiving (1867)" [MP3], ably mimicking the sense of loss that simultaneously haunts and heightens the holiday season for many of us.

Kenneth Irby begins his 1968 poem, "Thanksgiving Day and Lowell's Birthday" [MP3] with a succinct synopsis of the holiday's meaning: "This is / the day set aside / for public harvest's / gratitude, / giving back of all the energies of devotion /for an instant equal / to the energies gathered / of earth's sustenance given / or what was attended / watching the slow shift of season / knowledge thankful for to have gathered /before the shift — not so slow and more like a / sudden awareness come on too late — / before cold winter." You can read along with Irby at Jacket2, where the poem was published as part of the career-spanning 2014 feature, "On Kenneth Irby."

While many might be familiar with Charles Bernstein's delightfully-thorny "Thank You for Saying Thank You," I'm offering up a recording of his 2015 mutation of that poem, "Thank You for Saying You're Welcome" [MP3], which inverts the sentiments of the original: "This is a totally / inaccessible poem. / Each word, / phrase & / line / has been de- / signed to puz- / zle you, its / read- / er, & to / test whether / you're intel- / lect- / ual enough — / well-read or dis- / cern- / ing e- / nough — to ful- / ly appreciate th- / is / poem."

Finally, we turn our attention to the suite of poems that concludes Mark Van Doren's Folkways album, Collected and New Poems — "When The World Ends" / "Epitaph" / "Farewell and Thanksgiving" [MP3] — the last of which offers gratitude to the muse for her constant indulgence.