The Mad Poet of the Year blog posts share the poetry of a long-time Mad Poet. This year-long appointment provides readers with a deep dive of the writer’s work and thoughts on poetry. We are thrilled to have Bill Van Buskirk serve as the Mad Poet of the Year for 2025.
SINGING LESSON
To learn the hymn of praise start anywhere—
fateful dash of sperm to egg, congenial womb,
father on the train each morning
as you take shape in bliss…
Perhaps you feel it—
this trembling web, this good thick tapestry tangling
inside you and out.
Praise it. Praise every tender thread that makes you up.
Praise the brain, the nerves, the yards and yards of guts.
Praise the veins, arteries, alleyways, boulevards, highways,
and don’t forget the gene—destiny encoded
in the slenderest threads encircling the globe
to bring us—coffee beans from Brazil,
yogurt from good Pennsylvania cows,
bananas, the evening fish and rice, and you
at its center—suspended in the weave—
thickening into being all at once…
Praise it all. Praise
this fragile, blazing world we make—
so different from the old one—
dead objects divorced
from one another and from you.
Why do you stay there—
where the ocean that you bob on
is mistaken for a big idea?
Come, join us—the eight billion
who suck at the teats of the universe!
Half-formed, much beloved, we hang helpless in bunches—
grapes, apples, peaches—ripening, connected
even when our time is almost up
like patients hooked to their last I.V.’s—
some still hum a little tune—
stalk, throat, placenta, bloom…
Title: Singing Lesson. So, the title announces the poem’s purpose. There is no guesswork about it. As with any lesson, there is a teacher and a student, but they are not identified. The speaker/ teacher is an unidentified voice, albeit one who is in love with his subject. The student is silent throughout the poem—more of a voiceless presence, an empty space for the reader to occupy.
To learn the hymn of praise start anywhere: Anything might be praised. This is the easy part. This is the poem’s gift. “Start anywhere” gives the reader/student the widest possible permission to choose a starting point. What’s important here is attitude, intention and tone. To be successful, the poem must embody these tones, evoke them in the reader.
The poet teaches by doing. He teaches the hymn of praise by singing it himself. He praises what is most dear to him. In the process, he suggests what might be worthy of the student’s praise. The poet’s hymn stocked with metaphors for vastness and depth beyond his everyday experience. He shows how to confer this worth by singing. He urges the reader to take on its hymn-like tone.
fateful dash of sperm to egg, congenial womb: The poet’s catalogue of examples starts “at the beginning” so to speak—the mysterious moment of conception, a beginning he shares with the human race. We have all emerged from that “fateful dash,” have been nourished by that “congenial womb.”
father on the train each morning/ as you take shape in bliss: For all its weight, conception and gestation take place in the midst of daily life, in the one-thing-after-another of its mundane moments. The father on the train is a part of the picture, a part of what must be praised. For this image I thought of my own father who took the train into Philadelphia each morning to work at the Philadelphia Electric Company—taking care of business as I took shape in life.
Thus, the poet praises both the mysterious and the mundane. He wishes something similar for the student. Already the vast panorama of praise is beginning to take shape—from the intimate mysteries of conception and gestation to the very necessary busy-ness of the world.
Perhaps you feel it—: A word about diction: the word, “perhaps” is important. It signals the poem’s intent to suggest rather than instruct. It invites the student to imagine her own beginnings. The word “it” has no referent (at least until the next line). It could refer to anything. Once again, the poem creates a space for the student/ reader to enter.
this trembling web, this good thick tapestry tangling/inside you and out: And what is being felt? What is being suggested? The poet imagines and praises the web of connections between the mother’s body and the child’s own. The student-poet is urged to learn by feeling. For this the teacher provides two metaphors—one fragile (web) and one stout (good thick tapestry). Thus, the student is guided into what is most vulnerable and most vital about herself—this network of nerve, blood and tissue that mother and child share. The repetition of the word “this” is meant to bring the student’s imagination into contact with these intimacies.
Moreover, this web, this tapestry is not static. It “tangles.” It suffuses. It is at work in both the developing fetus and the growing student—who is encouraged to imagine (praise) it all. It is dynamic as well as mysterious. It makes things happen.
Next, the teacher urges the student to go into detail—into a vast catalogue of specifics. Praise it. Praise every tender thread that makes you up./ Praise the brain, the nerves, the yards and yards of guts./ Praise the veins, arteries, alleyways, boulevards, highways:
More on diction: The choice of body parts was pretty spontaneous. “Brain” and “veins” were chosen for the rhyme, but the rest were products of rhythmic choices—the patterning of stressed and unstressed syllables. I seek out patterns of sound that are pleasing to me rather than traditional iambics, dactylics, etc. The overall effect is (hopefully) to create a kind of rhythmic excess—a vastness and complexity worthy of praise. However, this not a poem just about the body. The catalogue of praise expands with the word, “arteries,” which can refer either to the circulatory system or the busy street with its traffic. So the hymn of praise seeks to name and to bless the dense network that holds us all together, both inside and out.
and don’t forget the gene—/destiny encoded /in the slenderest threads encircling the globe/to bring us—coffee beans from Brazil,/yogurt from good Pennsylvania cows,/bananas, the evening fish and rice, and you…: The poem unites the internal and external worlds through the metaphor of the gene. In this way, it goes on to include the world in its hymn. “Oh and by the way,” the teacher says—"don’t forget to praise the gene.” The poem is working hard here. Perhaps what it is trying to do is impossible—to achieve a kind of limitless praise. Even consumer goods have a place (coffee beans, yogurt etc.), mingle in and are shaped by the gene. Finally, the teacher finds a place for the student.
…and you at its center—suspended in the weave—/thickening into being all at once: There’s that tapestry, that weave, again—metaphors for the student taking shape in all the physical and cultural forces that make him up. What else is there to do but…
//Praise it all. Praise/this fragile, blazing world we make—: And we do make it, whether by deliberate construction or accident. The hymn of praise can fuse world and self. It bestows a great freedom--to construct a world through imagination, to have agency and choice.
so different from the old one—/dead objects divorced/from one another and from you: Here, the poet turns into cultural critic. She critiques the unpraised, taken-for-granted world in which we live, a world whose objects have not come to life in imagination and praise.
Why do you stay there/ where the ocean that you bob on/is mistaken for a big idea?: Why stay in a world unpraised, where the very forces that provide buoyancy and nourishment are reduced to mere objects of thought?
Come, join us—the eight billion: …There are eight billion souls on the planet, united by what we have in common, the world, the universe that sustains us. Like infants who suck at the teats of the universe we are helpless, dependent. We are like fruit hanging from a tree connected to, and ripening in, the earth that sustains it. In praise, we ripen and thrive, although we are…Half-formed, much beloved,/ we hang helpless in bunches—/ grapes, apples, peaches—ripening, connected.
But, like them, we also grow old and die in the midst of the life that sustains us. We are hooked to our last IV’s, (like fruit connected to its tree.) even when our time is almost up. The hymn of praise points to a final possibility…some still hum a little tune—/ stalk, throat, placenta, bloom: So the hymn of praise that begins with birth ends in death. But praise endures.
Bill Van Buskirk’s poems have appeared in The Comstock Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Mad Poets’ Review and many others. His chapbook, Everything that’s Fragile is Important, received honorable mention in the Jesse Bryce Niles Chapbook contest sponsored by the Comstock Review (2007). His book, This Wild Joy that Thrills Outside the Law, won the Joie de vivre contest sponsored by the Mad Poets’ Review. (2010). His latest book is The Poet’s Pocket Guide to Steady Employment (2023).