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Fish Are Jumpin' And The Beer's Ice Cold
Friday, June 13, 2008 III.6.2. Continuing the practice begun last issue, here's the rundown on what I have for you to read this week. First, from my library, I have: California poet Diane Wakoski Another California poet, Joshua Clover Ancient Tamil poet Ammuvanar The ever so fun E. E. Cummings From Ohio 30 years ago, George Peffer Chicago poet Campbell McGrath World traveler Blaise Cendrars Cowboy poet Kay Keller Poet J.B. White Poet, Editor & Professor Richard Howard No further introduction necessary, Robert Penn Warren Courtesy of the Knowville Writer's Guild, Edward Francisco Also I have my webpoet-friends: From the Bronx, Brenda Morisse From Maine & Arizona, Susan B. McDonough From Internet Land, Shawn Nocona Stroud From the Peaceful Pub poetry forum, Sara Zang From the coast of Western Australia, Laurel Lamperd And some from me, both old and new.  Diane Wakoski was born in Whittier, California in 1937 and educated at the University of California, Berkeley. My first poem this week is from Wakoski's collection,Emerald Ice, Selected Poems 1962-1987,published in 1996 by Black Sparrow Press of Santa Rosa, California. It was her twentieth full-length collection of poetry. She has also published numerous shorter collections. She is Writer in Residence at Michigan State University. Placing a $2 Bet for a Man who Will Never Go to the Races Any More There is some beauty in sorrow and the sorrowing, perhaps not beauty perhaps dignity would be a better word which communicates life beyond just what the body dictates food clothing shelter. It is nothing that lasts. It quickly turns into gloom, hate, resentment, a burdening apathy sometimes severity towards others; but like a scarlet bird from the tropics suddenly seen flying in a New York City park, so unexpected so unexplainable, there, different from its surroundings. Caliente, the poor man's race track, in Tijuana, Mexico, where I met my real father, an old retired sailor, after 14 years separation and learned that the real pleasures of gambling are knowing how to lose. Old man, I place a bet for you now that you're dead and I am still living. It is on a horse called "The Man I Love." Gamblers are sentimental so you will forgive me living now and giving away my love. Win or lose you played the races every day. A certain spirit I hope you've passed on to me. c. 1971  This is another one of my coffee shop observationals. attending to his lessons he talks like his teeth are too big for his mouth, like his teeth crowd his tongue when he talks making for a carefully enunciated accent i can't place he's about my age, maybe a little older, like late sixties, with a younger woman and he can't sit still - always moving, his head nodding, his arms and hands waving, his shoulders lifting front then back, his legs and his feet fidgeting in his flipflops, his toes flexing up down up down he is being tutored in Spanish by the young woman and he's trying very hard, but his thick tongue falls like a lead weight on the delicate, filigree of the lithe and darting language he is a mystery is it the music of Spanish that draws him, the music that he seems incapable of reproducing, or the chance to spend two evenings a week with a young woman who listens closely to his every word either way, i admire him for the effort  Photo by Chris Itz My new book for the week is Poems, Madonna anno domini by Joshua Clover. Clover, born in 1962 in Berkeley, California, is a poet, critic, journalist and author. He has appeared in three editions of Best American Poetry, is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and recipient of an individual grant from the NEA. Madonna anno domini, published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1997, was his first book of poetry. it received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has published two additional collections since. A graduate of Boston University and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Clover is an Associate Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the University of California, Davis, and was the distinguished Holloway poet-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley in 1999-2000. Under the pseudonym "Jane Dark", Clover has also written a number of film and music reviews for The Village Voice. Radiant City First it was one thing then it was one thing after another. We tend to think of fused flowers as igniting outward from a central place as in sex as in Haussmann's Radiant City. I saw it live on TV, From overhead it's possible to speak of the whole thing. First day of the riots but before that I was near home when S - this is just a personal incident - passed by in an old red shirt. They weren't letting people out of the stations as of the early rumors of lootings. This after Eastern Europe. Buildings burning to the south as in parables as in what punk rock promised. I found this exciting. "He was in control of the whole thing." The word is S doesn't do men anyway. A few shopping bags came into the City via the last trains before the curfew. We saw the 81 seconds on TV maybe a thousand times. Enough house-burning for night visions in Los Angeles but still the helicopters busy not really looking just humming overhead. A car rocked side to side as in a carnival ride then rolled it ignited in and excellent carnival ride. No clear argument - the whole thing was interruption. She was naked the onetime we met she was in a friend's bed to be delicate in a state of somedeshabille. Radiant as for example 1700 infrared poppies blooming in the over- head footage of south central. The second night of riots. As in Berlin years back - we have all seen this footage - when the Wall came down the main thing was chocolate also blue jeans. "He kept trying to get back up." We would not be allowed to leave the station the police would put us right back on the train. We would not be allowed to leave...the stations lacquered sanitary eggshell tones. Architecture as in a floral pattern of faint veins radiating from her pubic cup across her hips & down her thighs. We like to think we would get on our knees only for love. An older woman beating her purse into the City 60 feet below the broken glass bolted across the platform from our train to the opposite track. Hours passed after S until I loved the looters. In homes we watched the ether as in shopkeepers shooting into a crowd. To the opposite track - hours where the walled city of I wanted was hidden by the bright city of had need as in being blown away from that place in fractures of reflective rubble. I had planned to practiced the compliance position with my hands on my head not trying to rise but was interrupted - as in fantasies of S in riot gear. This was the poppy vision. I admit I found the whole thing exciting. We have all seen this footage.  My next poem is by Brenda Morisse. Brenda lives in the Bronx. Although this is the first time she's appeared in "Here and Now," Brenda has featured at numerous poetry venues in New York City. don't spit on the spit until the pig roast is over For the family reunion at the old house upstate, I had just gotten my period and was grudgingly mature at nine, so I lied and said the blood on the towel wasn't mine. Aunt Lily turned white and thought it was Linda's blood even more shocking because Linda was only six. Well, the catastrophe was cleared up when mamita whispered to her sister. The knowing look blushed on my cheeks. I wasn't a vegetarian yet but roly-poly piggy spiked on a spit biting an apple seemed no more bizarre than the hula theme of the get-together. I didn't know they had apple orchards in Hawaii. All my girl cousins were costumed in green plastic hula skirts. I alreaady had mine from the church play when I starred as Loki. Mamita threatened to pull the plug if I didn't keep my grades up. When I realized I had to kiss the boy and taste his spit after we sang the finale, I begged to drop out. But my mother wouldn't hear of it. She just wanted to nag and yell, and be a cop on Hawaii Five 0. Practice! Do your homework! Memorize your lines! Where's your homework?. Third grade was cursed and, now, to top it off, Shake a leg. We're going to a luau!.  For my next poem I'm going back that massive volume of poems (1,238 pages, not counting notes), World Poetry, An Anthology of Verse From Antiquity to Our Time, for a poem from the Tamil people of nearly two thousand years ago. Tamils are from the Indian subcontinent with a recorded history going back more than two millennia. The oldest Tamil communities are those of southern India and northeastern Sri Lanka. There are also a number of Tamil emigrant communities scattered around the world, especially in central Sri Lanka, Malaysia, South Africa, Singapore, Pakistan and Mauritius with more recent emigrants found in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the United States, and Europe. There are an estimated 77 million Tamils around the world. The art and architecture of the Tamil people includes some of India's greatest contributions to the art world. The music, the temple architecture and the stylized sculptures favored by the Tamil people are still being learned and practiced. The classical language of Tamil, one of the oldest languages in India, has the oldest literature still in existence among other Dravidian languages. Unlike many ethnic groups, Tamils were not governed by a single political entity during most of their history; Tamilakam, the traditional name for the Tamil lands, was politically united for only a brief period, between the 9th and 12th centuries. The poem I've chosen is by Ammuvanar, a Tamil poet from 50-300 AD. From the little I've been able to learn of him, it appears he is somewhat known for his erotic poetry. The translation is by George L. Hart III. These ancient poems fascinate me for the way they let us into times so far from out own, yet so like our own in all the most important ways. They Shout Out The Price of Salt They shout out the price of salt harvested from salt flats: they travel for distance on dusty roads as they go in their caravans over long trails carrying thick staffs. The life of these salt merchants seem a good one to me. Her curly hair tossing, the dress of shoots she wears to ornament her wide, soft loins swaying with each step, "People of the town! Salt is cheap as paddy! Will you buy some?" "Listen, you with your belly curved and arms supple as bamboo, you did not tell us the price of the salt of your body," I said, standing a little away. Her anger showing in her large, red-lined eyes blackened with collyrium, she said, "You, over there, who are you?" And innocent, very lovely, she moved off a little, smiling, her few rows of whit bangles flashing, taking my heart with her.  I was looking through some of my old stuff to use this week, since it seems my new stuff has begun to bore even me, not a good sign. This old one might be just as bad, but at least I haven’t read it in a while. a poem about Sacagawea, sorta i'm a good guy, i said, but not that good. this, after I dropped one of those new, gold Sacagawea dollar coins into the tip jar. can i reach in and take that dollar back? i asked, i thought it was a quarter. with a long sigh that sounded like how'dyougetoutthehomewithoutakeeperdipshit the girl at the counter said, i'll get it, and reached her hand into the jar and jangled coins around, sounding like the holdup alarm at the PR Puffnsnort useless-little-things-you-couldn't-afford- even-it-they- were-good-for-something shop, until she finally found the coin, pulled it out, looked at ever so closely, studying it like she was going to have to describe it when the swat team came busting trough the door, then here it is, she said as she handed it to me, have a nice day (dimwit) the last part she didn't say out loud, but i heard her anyway. you too, chickie, is what I thought, but what i said was thanks, you have a real good day, too, and took my coffee to my table, sat down, pulled out my notebook and faced the great white, blank space in my mind that always starts and sometimes ends my daily poem.  Now, here's E. E. Cummings from his collection is 5 a little family history. XI nobody loses all the time i had an uncle named Sol who was a born failure and nearly everybody said he should have gone into vaudeville perhaps because my Uncle So could sing McCann He Was A Diver on Xmas Eve like Hell Itself which may or not account for the fact that my Uncle Sol indulged in that possibly most inexcusable of all to use a highfalootin phrase luxuries that is or to wit farming and be it needlessly added my Uncle Sol's farm failed because the chickens ate the vegetables so my Uncle Sol had a chicken farm till the skunks ate the chickens when my Uncle Sol had a skunk farm but the skunks caught cold and died and so my Uncle Sol imitated the skunks in a subtle manner or by drowning himself in the watertank but somebody who'd given my Uncle Sol a Victor Victrola and records while he lived presented to him upon the auspicious occasion of his decease a scrumptious not to mention splendiferous funeral with tall boys in black gloves and flowers and everything and I remember we all cried like the Missouri when my Uncle Sol's coffin lurched because somebody pressed a button and down went my Uncle Sol and started a worm farm)  Susan B. McDonough hasn't been with us for a while, but here she is now with a new piece. Susan creates gardens for a living and enjoys the journey of transplanting words into poetry. She lives a near bi-coastal life, one foot in the Arizona desert and the other on the rocky coast of Maine, two places that seem to me as different as any two places could be. The idea of living in two such different places appeals very much to me. Her poems can be found both on-line and in print. June 1, Ogunquit I feel the sun on my skin it is not quite eight a.m. The beach, it wants me. It has sent me an invitation with a slight shift of a sea breeze. I'll take my sister with me, but only in my thoughts. She'd like that.  This next piece is from Orphan Trees, a book of poetry by "two young Ohio poets," George Peffer and Terry Murcko. The book was published by Pig Iron Press Poetry in 1980. The poems I'm using are by Peffer. I googled him, hoping to find out what happened since these early poems were published 28 years ago but did not find any references I could be sure referred to him. Ennui Poem Once I had choice Mercy totally abandoned My restlessness is all that's left: Purgatories souls inhabit me With interminable lease. I'm pushed about on elegant sticks - I'm the gorilla's fat heart Or in mud a noble trend: We inherit our euphemisms - Bored or Drunk. Ennui These walls are painted the rumor Of blue. I can't get out of bed. I can't catalogue my old inertias or the new, I pay homage through and sleep instead. Ennui Phobias Afraid to leave the house. Afraid it'll burn down, I check all the ashtrays Twice. This year it's fire. Last year it was water, Or cars, or nuclear war, Or women. All disasters Are eventually personal - The world is a transplanted Heart that either takes Or doesn't. Ennui 2 All morning at metaphysical Calisthenics flat on my back I dispatch my aura to the existential Camp, but it's empty Everyone is out walking their options, Washing & waxing their portfolios Or having polite brunch with capitalism - In ennui everything is literal: A life of compounding ironies Is taking its toll. We stay down Spread eagle and summon Assassinating angels.  Here's a piece I wrote last week. the time of our lives still pushing even though i don't have to i tried to slow myself down today even took a nap this afternoon, hard for me to do because always on my mind the things i want to do poems to write, a book to finish, flower beds full of weeds even drought cannot kill and i want to keep myself from falling into the trap of believing i have lots of time because that's not true, none of us have lots of time - the time we have is the time we have and whether it is measured in days or years i am loath to to sleep through any of it, knowing in the end no one is through with living before their life is finished, knowing in the end we will all come up short  Campbell McGrath, born in 1962, is the author of six full-length collections of poetry, including his most recent, Pax Atomica. I have chosen a poem from one of his earlier books, Florida Poems published by HarperCollins in 2002. McGrath was born in Chicago, and grew up in Washington, D.C., where he attended Sidwell Friends School. He received his B.A. from the University of Chicago in 1984 and his MFA from Columbia University's creative writing program in 1988. He currently lives in Miami, Florida, and teaches creative writing at Florida International University. McGrath has received numerous American poetry awards, including the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a MacArthur Foundation "Genius Award." This poem interests me for many reasons, one being I grew in south Texas only a tiny bit further north latitude than Miami in a physical environment very much like the one described in the poem, including especially the weather and the semitropical flora. Late February, Miami Beach All morning the woodpecker drills holes in the oranges left to rot upon the highest limbs; barbarous jays gather twigs to build a nest in the barren live oak, in the wishbone branches of the royal poinciana, in the pollen-spiked sponge of a blossoming mango tree. Already the days bear within them the seed of what is to come - flowers born at dawn to perish in the furnace of mid-afternoon. Thus the gardenia hoards its fragrance for nightfall. Thus jasmine husbands it pearls until dusk. After dinner I see the face of my father looking back at me from the kitchen window, secretive, aquiline, ferreting out one chocolate cookie, one swig of milk from the carton as the baby is put to bed, this small hunger nurtured like an orchid, indulged precisely, in a prism of refractive solitude. Beyond the grass the moon in its reflected glory shepherds clouds off the Atlantic on a trade wind scented by blossoms of excruciating beauty.  Next up, a poem by Shawn Nacona Stroud Shawn's poetry has appeared in the Crescent Moon Journal, Mississippi Crow Magazine, Loch Raven Review, The Poetry Worm, and, of course, Here and Now. His work has also appeared in the poetry anthologies Poetry Pages Volume IV and Poetry From The Darkside Volume 2 and was recently nominated for the Pushcart Prize for 2008. Here's his poem. Hardcastle Crags (For Sylvia Plath) Heptonstall chalks soot - blackened stone cottages on the Hebden river as he passes, sidewalk art on a sheen of rain sopped black top - people, factory stacks, and the cobbled bridge bleeds to a smear along the bankside; only boat bobs betray a current. Passersby do not scuttle from his path, he wipes fury blank as an eraser swiped slate on his face, screeches the proper details onto the board, mimics each smile and nod, weaving past them along the bridleway. Stamping sparks like a steel U shoe, his anger blends with the herd's tread: heel rapped echoes dwindle at his back - a vessel of sound sails a seethe of green moor and is lost on a sea of heath and peat bogs. He hears nothing of their demise. Ahead crowds thin, odors of earth rise. Millstone crags peek out from the tree tops, stacked as the bracken fungus that clings to those sycamores and oaks. Moss slicks rocks that clutter the riven world, veils stone features like her skin envelops him. She battles to conquer her flesh again, watches approaching grasses quill air in the distance, moiling their defensive greens through a break in the trees. Walking out of the woodland at Walshaw. Stoodley Pike looms on a distant moor as she snaps into her human husk, emerges from the leaf-strained gloom. Her body is his cocoon; he'll rip free once it's used.  Frederic Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was born in Switzerland in 1887 and died in Paris in 1961. Beginning when he was 15 years old and for the rest of his life, he was a world traveler, visiting places such as China, Mongolia, Siberia, Persia, the Caucasus, Russia and and the Americas, all becoming gist for his writings. Beginning in 1916 when he was naturalized French, Paris was his base. After first moving to Paris in 1910, Cendrars met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, mutually influencing each other's work. His writing career was interrupted by World War I when he fought in the French Foreign Legion on the front lines in Europe. During the bloody attacks in Champagne in September of 1915, he lost his right arm and was discharged from the army. Returning to Paris where he became an important part of the era of artistic creativity going on in Montparnasse at the time. He was friends with Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller plus many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. After the war, he became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Needing to generate sufficient income, after 1925 he stopped publishing poetry and focused on novels or short stories. In 1961, he was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for literature. He died in Paris later that year. Cendrars is another poet I had never heard of before beginning to look for material for "Here and Now." Since my first reading of him, he has been one of my favorites. I especially admire the little travel poems he did for their freshness and the way they bring us into the moment he is describing. Reading Cendrars on his travel is like being there with him, the best of traveling companions. The poem I'm using today is more serious, but still in a sense, a travel poem as he visits his past. It is one of a series of fragments from "To the Heart of the World'" included in the book Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems published by the University of California Press in 1992. The translation is by Ron Padgett. Suddenly the sirens wail and I run to my window. Already the cannons are thundering over toward Aubervilliers. The sky is starred with Jerry planes, shells, crisscrosses, rockets, Cries, whistles, and meismas that melt and moan beneath the bridges. The Seine is darker than an abyss, with its heavy barges that are Long like the coffins of the tall Merovingian kings Bedizened with stars that drown - in the depths - in the depths. I turn and blow out the lamp and light a big cigar. The people running for it in the street, thundering, still half-asleep Will take refuge in the basement of police headquarters that smells like powder and saltpeter. The police commissioner's purple car meets the firechief's red car, Magical and supple, wild caressing, tigresses like shooting stars. The sirens miaow and fall silent. The shindig is going full blast. Up there. It's insane. At bay. Cracking and heavy silence. Then a shrill falling and dull vehemence of the bombs. The crashing down of millions of tons. Flashes. Fire. Smoke. Flame. Accordion of the 75s. Fits. Cries. Fall. Stridencies. Coughing. Collapses and cave-ins. The sky is jumping with imperceptible winking Pupils, multicolored streaks, that cut, that divide, that revive the melodious propellers. A searchlight suddenly hits the billboard of Baby Cadum Then leaps into the sky and bores a milky hole in it like a baby bottle. I get my hat and now I go down into the dark streets. Here are the portly old houses that lean against each other like old men, The chimneys and weathervanes all point to the sky with their fingers. I walk up the rue Saint-Jacques, shoulders jammed into my pockets. Here's the Sorbonne and its tower, the church, the Lycee Louis-le- Grand. A little further up I go in and ask a butcher for a light. I light up a new cigar and we exchange a smile. He has a nice tattoo, a name, a rose, and a heart with a dagger through it. It's a name I know well: it's my mother's. I rush out into the street. I'm facing the building. Stabbed heart - first point of impact - And more beautiful than your naked torso, handsome butcher - The building where I was born.  This is an old piece I wrote in 2002. It appeared in that same year in Retrozine, one of several little journals from Cayuse Press that I still miss. by the light of the silvery moon i can see it clearly in the cloudless night, the dark areas of its seas visible, not dried seabed, as we thought, but scars from the early days when it and our own earth were freshly born, fragile in the beginning, when debris from creation's chaos fell through airless skies, punched through the crust of lunar surface, released ts molten core to blow black in the reflected light of the sun, our sun, old in the scale of its captive off-spring, but still young in the cycle of its own kind, the cycle of stars that light the night into our own time, as even into our own time the black scars remain, reminders of the time when fire ruled all and all of time and space bubbled in the furnace of conception and as this bright survivor rises, i think of the night nearly forty years ago when Cronkite and Schirra wept for us all to see, when our finite realm stretched to include on small piece of that battered surface, the surface where we stirred dust undisturbed since the turmoil that spread it, that surface where we left footprints to outlast all our grandest ambitions, footprints to say, past even our own slow but certain slide to extinction, we were, and while we were, we were here, and i think of my youth, watching the first Russian satellite pass overhead, a new moon, man-made sister to the old, the tiny moving dot of it reflecting sunlight from the other side of the world right back to us, lying on our backs in a South Texas field, and beyond that tiny moving light, as always, the moon, lantern to our night, beacon to our dreams for as long as we have been able to lift our heads and wonder we were so naive then, believing we had reached beyond our shallow natures, believing all was possible, believing with Armstrong that one small step could finally release the better angels of our kind, better angels imprisoned so long by our history, subjugated by the brutal demands of survival but the wars went on and hate and cruelty one to the other went on and we grew old and tired of believing, except for nights like this when the great lantern shines over us undiminished and we remember when the universe seemed spread before us, waiting for us to recognize our destiny, our place among the great league of far-travelers that surround us then, for a while we remember and believe again  Cowboy poetry doesn't get a lot of respect from the "serious" folk, which is one of its attractions to me. It can be read just for the fun of it's lines and language, without any obligation to waste a lot of time on "deep-think." The next poem is from an anthology of cowboy poetry, New Cowboy Poetry, A Contemporary Gathering published by Gibbs-Smith Publisher in 1990. The poet is Kay Kelley who first came into contact with cowboy poetry by way of her first husband's poetry writing about the experiences of a horse trainer and cowboy in the Southwest. After is death, Kelley took up the subject in her own writing. She remarried in 2007 to the manager of a ranch south of Alpine, Texas, where she helps her husband with his own registered Gelbvieh and commercial herds. She is is said to be easing out of the horse business but keeps some good ones around to play with. I have a bay cutting filly That can sure scowl at a cow. You'd be impressed by her classy moves if you saw her sweep and bow. But when we're not working cattle, Where she has to be quick on her toes, A quiet pleasure we both enjoy Is playing with Foxy's nose. As I stroke her fluttering nostrils And our breaths we do exchange, She smells of sweet alfalfa And the grasses of the range. And looking up into big, brown eyes, Her concentration shows Just how intent she is on our game, While I'm playing with Foxy's nose. Her strip flows down along her face And puddles in a snip. As I hold her velvet muzzle, She never tries to nip. So we share these peaceful moments, While my filly snorts and blows. Each breathing in contentment, While we're playing with Foxy's nose.  Here's a nice piece from Sara Zang, administrator of "The Peaceful Pub" poetry forum. Welcome back, Sara. Haven't seen you in a while. we can be We can be the tulip reborn in Spring, That cold brown bulb, nurturing through winter the warmth around its roots, that tiny spark hidden beneath the rot of dusky leaves from seasons past, the single greening spike that spurs its way through February's ice to taste the gentler promises of Spring, free from fear of March's fickle wind. We can be the first loden leaf budding, the straight, strong stem, the pistil and the stamen, We can be the satin petals blooming. Let's look to April, raise our voice and sing, Together, we can be most anything, We can be the tulip reborn in Spring.  My next piece if from the October, 2007 issue of Poetry. The poet is J.P. White, who has published three books of poetry, In Pursuit of Wings in 1978, The Pomegranate Tree Speaks from the Dictator's Garden in 1988 and The Salt Hour in 2001. Southern Comfort Three turkey vultures talk shop on a sand dune. A slow scorch inches toward the tideline. No one knows if the hurricane will come in time to drown the flames leaping out of the swamp. The ancients believe the oceans remember the shape of every hull that plies the waters. I feel that too, sitting with you, some powers in us may not die even after our life slips through its wake. How else to explain the comfort of watching you half asleep, half drifting between this life and the deep - your body a lens through which I see all the boats between us, lost forever - lost except in the ocean of memory which is everywhere looking in the lee for where we've gone. No one knows, what happens after the body lays down its sorrows, not even those three vultures, more patient than priests hunched at the altar, each red head glistening like a peach.  I wonder if anyone else remembers the "Thin Man" movie series. Well, this is a poem about a thin woman, having nothing at all to do with the "Thin Man." the thin lady the incredibly thin thin la d y sits a c r o s s the room eating straw b e r r y pie with whipped cream and a d o l l o p of choc o lot sy r up my good ness how does the everso thin lady stay so t h i n just plain s k i n n y she'd blow a w a y if it wasn't for her big fat feet and oversized tennies lord a'mighty that's one l e a n fe ma le  Here's a funny piece by Richard Howard from his book Trappings, New Poems published by Turtle Point Press in 1999. Born in Cleveland in 1929, Howard studied at Columbia University and the Sorbonne. After working for several years as a lexicographer, he became a translator of French and published over 150 translations. In 1983 he received the American Book Award for his translation of Baudelaire's fleurs du mal. Even as he translated he continued his own original writing and, in 1970, received a Pulitzer Prize for his third book of poems, Untitled Subjects and later received the Academy of Arts and Letters Award for his various books of poetry. He was a longtime poetry editor of The Paris Review and is currently poetry editor of The Western Humanities Review. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Professor of Practice in the writing program at Columbia's School of the Arts. It seems to me he must have been having some fun with this one. Disclaimers The text of Bach's St. John Passion, performed tonight unabridged, is largely derived from the Gospels, portions of which are alleged (by some) to be antisemitic. Such passages may well disclose historical attitudes fastened (by Bach himself) to the Jews, but must not be taken as having (for that very reason) expressed convictions or even opinions of the Management or the cast. The Rape of the Sabine Women, which the artist painted in Rome, articulates Ruben's treatment of a favorite classical theme. Proud as we are to display this example of Flemish finesse, the policy of the Museum is not to be taken amiss: we oppose all forms of harassment, and just because we have shown this canvas in no way endorses the actions committed there in Ensconced in the Upper Rotunda alongside a fossil musk-ox, the giant Tyrannosaurus (which the public has nicknamed "Rex"), though shown in the act of devouring its still-living prey implies no favor by the public officials to zoophagous public displays carnivorous Life-Styles are clearly inappropriate to a State which has already outlawed tobacco and may soon prohibit meat.  Laurel Lamperd lives within sight of the Southern Ocean on the south coast of Western Australia. She writes novels and short stories as well as poetry. With a friend, she published The Ink Drinkers, a poetry and short story anthology of their work. With this poem, Laurel introduces me to a new use for jellyfish. I don't think I can claim at this point that I am convinced. Medusae There's millions out there in warm coastal waters propelled by the currents into bays and rivers annoying hapless swimmers with their stings. Boys had jelly fish fights tossing them like hand grenades. Diving under coming up to begin another attack. Girls squealed when touching one. They stood watching. The genders were clearly defined then. We're eating Medusae now dried packed in bags. used in favourite Asian dishes.  Next, we'll check in with one of the masters, remembered more as a novelist than a poet. Robert Penn Warren was born in Kentucky in 1905. After graduating summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1925, he received a master's degree from the University of California in 1927 and did graduate work at Yale University and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar in 1930. Warren published many books, including ten novels, fourteen volumes of poetry, a volume of short stories, a play, a collection of critical essays, a biography, three historical essays, a critical book on Drieser, a study of Melville and two studies of race relations in America. All of this work was published over a period of 51 years during which he maintained an active career as a professor of English. His best known work is All the Kings Men, published in 1946 and for which he won the first of his several Pulitzer Prizes. I so enjoyed this book when I read it while I was in High School and later when I saw the first movie version that I purposefully avoided seeing the lastest version for fear of what it would do to all my memories of the pleasure the book brought me. This book and the book The Last Hurrah by, I think, O'Hara, are the definitive political books for me. Warren died in 1989. The poem I have for this issue is from his collection Rumor Verified, Poems 1979-1980. Summer Rain in Mountains A dark curtain of rain sweeps slowly over the sunlit mountain. It moves with steady dignity, like the curtain over the Great window of a stately drawing room, or across a proscenium. The edge of the drawn curtain of rain is decisive Like a knife-edge. Soon it will slice the reddening sun across with delicate Precision. On the yet sunlit half of the mountain miles of massed trees, Glittering in green as they forever climb toward gray ledges, Renounce their ambition, they shudder and twist, and The undersides of leaves are grayly exposed to crave mercy. The sun disappears. Chairs are withdrawn from the sun-deck. A whisper is moving through the wide air. The whole event Is reminding you of something. Your breathing becomes irregular, and Your pulse flutters. Conversation dies. In silence, you piquantly Spy on faces that were once familiar. They seem To huddle together. One has a false face. What, In God's name, are you trying to remember? Is it Grief, loss of love long back, loss of confidence in your mission? Or A guilt you can't face? Or a nameless apprehension That dog like, at night, in darkness, may lie at the foot of your bed, Its tail now and then thumping the floor, with a sound that Wakes you up? Your palms may then sweat. The wild Thought seizes you that this may be a code. It may be a secret warning. A friend addressing you now. You miss the words. You Apologize, smile. The rain hammers the roof, Quite normally. The little group is quite normal too, some With highballs in hand. One laughs. He is a philosopher. You know that fact because a philosopher can laugh at Anything. Suddenly, rain stops. The sun Emerges like God's calm blessedness that spills On the refurbished glitter of mountain. Chairs Are taken again out to the sun-deck. Conversation becomes unusually animated as all await the glory Of sunset. You pull yourself together. A drink helps. After all, it's the sort of thing that may happen to anybody. And does.  I wrote this poem in 2001 when one of the best views of San Antonio was ripped up and paved over. The poem is more than a little rantish, but this was not the first hill to be paved over here, nor was it the last. Maybe, if the high price of gas does nothing else good, it might, at least, save a few hills, and trees and meadows by pushing people back toward already settled areas because of the high and higher cost of commuting. don't shop at lowe's home improvement warehouse high meadow gently sloped hill carpeted with grass wildflowers at the very top oak trees the largest as wide around as two long-armed me could stretch an old tree tall and sturdy when the mission in the valley below fell to the army of santa ana bloody cries of patriots drifting in the wind with the smoke of musket and cannon fire earlier a sapling when golden galleons sunk in salty gulf waters to the east sailors dying on hot island sand killed by a summer storm that swept across the tidal bays pushed inland dropping rain to feed the grass and wildflowers to make the sapling grow earlier still a seedling when comanche roamed the hills around and white men first claimed the green shores for god and king casting the first long shadows over the old life of earth and sky and spirits making all one with the other fate shifted changes unforeseen but maybe for an old wise man who might have set upon this hill and smelled the stench of death approaching the same stench now but no tree shade five centuries grown gone scars in the earth where old roots were pulled from the ground paved over gone with the grass and wildflowers all covered in asphalt a graveyard made so we might park our pickups and suvs  My next poem is from All Around Us: Poems from the Valley, a poetry anthology put together by the Knoxville Writer's Guild, published by Blue Ridge Publishing in 1996. The poem I've chosen is by Edward Francisco, Poet/Scholar for the Voices and Visions Poetry Project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Library Association. His own work includes L(ie)fe Boat, winner of the 1994 chapbook competition from Bluestone Press in Massachusetts. On Being Photographed in Middle Age By no means now the boy in the striped shirt I was at ten - he hangs on the upstairs wall, object of passing curiosity but more of derision by this laughing house of children who wonder why he never smiles. I don't tell them he had no reason or that he'd probably just been beaten by a tense mother never agreeing with the way he tucked his shirt in (worse than an orphan, she said) or combed his hair back off his head. Same boy tried for years to locate just the right crease in his clothes, the right style to satisfy the unsatisfiable requirements of one not pictured. Not even the slender likeness taken in college when he dressed the part of a protester without a protest, without a word of his own, could conceal the borrowed texts under his arm enabling him to quote someone else's pain by proxy, using up the voices around him. That boy was snapped in a glare once that made both eyes wink like asterisks, adding to the growing list of the parts of me that hid from the cameras. No doubt I joked or the photographer's sake about the risk of overexposure. Now twenty years forward I no longer hold my breath for the perfect pose or worry about the wrinkles in the trousers I failed to take to the cleaners. The eyes seem to be in focus too. And I like the way I grin without knowing why when my wife asks me to hold still and say cheese. It is compensation for having to pose in difficult light. Who, after all, could have detected the half of me that couldn't wait to be developed, the dazzle in every snapshot that couldn't be explained? Now molecules scramble to take a familiar shape at my side. In the form I know best as my son he crowds before the camera, refusing to be left out of the one picture where all of him can stand in stripes, smiling.  Now, one last poem from me before we close shop for the week. I wrote the poem in 2001 about my usual tormentor, summer. It's not as bad this year as it was in 2001, but, then, the summer here has barely started. dreams of early frost after a long, cool flight from Charleston i remember stepping onto the tarmac in Dhahran into dry Saudi heat that seemed alive with purpose and premeditation, like a animal, a desert predator with sandy breath blowing red hot from furnace innards and a coal-fed soul it's been like that here this summer first the dust storms, blown in from Africa by high winds aloft, leaving a coat of Kalahari grit over everything stationary, from mission walls to mall parking lots to the restaurant umbrellas lining the Riverwalk then the wind stopped and the skies cleared and central Texas heat flared down like fire from above, like th brimstone of prophecy, and there is no relief, even at night, when the parched hills and brown meadows radiate back into the black open night heat stored through the fifteen hour day and just as it begins to cool, the sun rises again  As I struggle to find my way out of these woods (moss on the north side? or the south?), remember, all the work presented in this blog remains the property of its creators.; the blog itself is produced by and is the property of me....allen itz |
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