|
|
|
|
|
Ups & Downs
Friday, January 15, 2010 V.1.3. I want to mention this week that I have "Here and Now" traffic reports for 2009, showing nearly 31,000 visits to the site, and nearly 310,000 hits. I still don't know what all that means, but, as a possibly delusional creature of a culture and time when large numbers are usually prized over small numbers, I am pleased. As to our poetry this week, I am featuring two of our friends from Australia. 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 collection of their work. Sue Clennell, who also lives in Western Australia, has a degree in journalism and has been a librarian and a teacher. Here's who else I have this week. Escapism Jimmy Santiago Baca Book I - As Life Was One Eleven Twenty Book III - La Guerra Eight Laurel Lamperd Happy Families Me diddlysquat Robert Bly Frost Still on the Ground Late Moon A Dream of Retarded Children Black Pony Eating Grass Fallen Tree Sue Clennell Correspondent Me bananafanafofana Brook Bergan Plate 18: Cover Girl Plate 20: Venus Leaning on a Dresser Laurel Lamperd Borderline Me forbidden Robert Penn Warren Dawn Sue Clennell In black and white Me or else Naomi Shihab Nye The Words Under the Words Lunch in Nablus City Park Laurel Lamperd Pastures Me and all is good this morning Brother Antoninus Night Scene The Citadel Me a minor poet explains it all Anne Sexton Her Kind Me the deer and the pigs and me, again  I start this week with a poem from Sue Clennell, one of our two featured Australian poets. The poem was first published in She's a train and she's dangerous. Escapism She bought a packet of budgerigar seed, thousands of prospective sunflowers and planted them all over her yard. What are you going to do with them? she was asked. I just want a field of sunflowers like the margarine advertisement. Big golden suns shining at me from everywhere, the lost treasure of the Incas. And if they come up in their hundreds so much the better, to help me forget I am a prisoner of suburbia to help me forget I can hear next door shaving her armpits or shouting at the kids. Oh hang it all let's all buy a packet of bird seeds.  In doing this weekly "Here and Now" post I am often disappointed that many of the poems i like the most are too long to be used. This is especially true this week in the poems I am using from Healing Earthquakes, a book by one of my favorite poets, Jimmy Santiago Baca published by Grove Press in 2001. It is a book filled with great, very long, poems that I had to pass up in favor of some also fine but shorter pieces. If you enjoy deep, rich poetry in a longer form, I recommend this book to you. Baca was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His awards and honors include the Wallace Stevens Chair at Yale, the National Endowment of Poetry Award, Vogelstein Foundation Award, National Hispanic Heritage Award. Berkeley Regents Award, Pushcart Prize, Southwest Book Award and American Book Award. The collection is divided into five shorter books. My poems will come from two of those books.” The first two poems are from Book I - As Life Was One With this letter I received from a young Chicano doing time in New Boston, Texas, I'm reminded of the beauty of bars and how my soul squeezed through them like blue cornmeal through a sifting screen to mix with the heat and moisture of the day in each leaf and sun ray offering myself to life like bread. He tells me he reads a lot of books and wants my advice and more amazed he quotes from my books, honoring my words as words that released him from the bars, the darkness, the violence of prison. It makes me wonder, getting down on myself as I usually do that maybe I'm not the pain in the butt I sometimes think I am. I used to party a lot, but now I study landscapes and wonder a lot, listen to people and wonder a lot take a sip of good wine and wonder more, until my wondering has filled five or six years and literary critics and fans and fellow writers ask why haven't you written anything in six years? And I wonder about that - I don't reveal to them that I have boxes of unpublished poems and that I rise at six-thirty each morning and read books, jot down notes, compose a poem, throwing what I've written or wondered on notepads in a stack in a box in a closet. Filled with wonder at the life I'm living, distracted by presidential impeachment hearings and dick-sucking interns, and Iraq bombings, my attention is caught by the kid without a T-shirt in winter on the courts who can shoot threes and never miss, by a woman who called me the other night threatening to cut her wrists because she was in love and didn't want to be in love, by the crackhead collecting cans at dawn along the freeway. Sore-hearted at the end of each day, wondering how to pay bills, thinking how I'll write a poem to orphans for Christmas and tell them that's their present and watch them screw up their faces - saying, huh, wondering what kind of wondering fool I've become that even during Christmas I'm wondering... caught in the magical wonder of angels on Christmas trees colored lightbulbs all of it making me remember the awe and innocence of my own childhood, when Santa came with a red bag to the orphanage and gave us stockings bulging with fruit and nuts. It was a time of innocence, gods walking around my bunk at night, divine guardians whispering at my ear how they'd take care of me - and they did, armies of angels have attended me in rebellious travels, and the only thing that's changed since then is instead of me writing to Santa, I'm like the ornery pit bull leashed to a neck chain aching to bite the ass of an IRS agent wondering why anyone in their right mind would, with only one life to live, have a job making people so miserable. It's something to wonder about. Eleven Graffiti on walls. Large tablets of stone Moses Sedillo scribbles on about freedom. Our Berlin walls our Juarez border. Agents in helicopters, others in green jeeps, insomniacs with yellow faces lit by monitor screens, check buses, cars, trucks and pedestrians - and Moses Sedillo scribbles on about freedom. In October the freedom of leaves changing colors, burying themselves in the ground. Small golden coffins floating down the ditches. And then the wiry, haggard branches become old men tottering behind the coffins, fallen in the dirt road, leaning against fences. Moses throws himself on the park grass and smells the green grass, the black earth, the fine, thin coldness of the atmosphere. He scribbles about freedom on walls. No one knows what he means. the cops label him a vandal. The upper-middle- class folks of the Heights are filled with fear, and the people in Santa Fe are angry when they see his black letters on white adobe walls. Moses gives a nondescript shrug of indifference and walks about the mountains and arroyos, in the midst of aspens, thinking of beauty *** But Viviano from Nicaragua knows what Moses is saying. Karina from El Salvador reads the words to her children after she buys tortillas from the store. Perfecto Flores, elo viejo del barrio who goes to visit his brothers in Durango, understands the graffiti. When the wall is painted over, the words push through the paint like prisoners' hands through prison bars at strangers passing on the streets. Twenty And when they come, as they have, Grandma, I seek strength in your humble memory. As contrary and far-fetched as my metaphors and images may seem to a woman in the hot, dry prairie, when you walked I knew somewhere in the world a great pianist was playing to your steps, when you looked at beans, corn, squash, a simple glass of water, your gaze had a melody of a hundred choirs singing in harmony, all in unison, thanking the Great Creator for your many blessings. O dear sweet ancient woman who never uttered a word of pain on her behalf, who was sometimes mean or cross with me, who chased and shooed me from the house on wash day or made me scrub my face with freezing-cold water, your faults were cliff-edge fingerholds; anyone brave enough to climb to the summit would be awarded with a sight only angels were given. And I climbed there many times and as many you called me your angel. Today, when I'm besieged by enemies from all sides, when the easy way out haunts me, when I would prefer to sit in a cantina and drink with my friends, when doing drugs with acquaintances to forget the pain of living seems easier than to live with dignity, when I promise to try harder, when all those vows of conviction weakly drain blood from my lips, I kiss your face again in my memory and tell you to watch me, just watch - I will not surrender to the worst part of myself but be a man you can be proud of, who has learned well from you, sweet Grandma. And as they come, as they do, I wade out in the field, briskly parting the tall weeds and ignoring the briars, I move forward to meet them, to show them that all their flags and hollering and weapons mean nothing to me when I have you in my heart. When my heart rims with bubbling waterfalls cracking past obstacles that have tried to prevent my jaguar howling, my veins swell with fiery colt-jumps in hefty alfalfa fields, and I must compose my songs solemn as monks changing in a medieval monastery, dark stone and polished rock hallways echo my wailing of sorrow and loneliness, and at other times the maddened conga drums of my heart are beaten by black hands, white hands, red hands, brown hands, every race calling me to celebrate their humanity, their laughter, their sadness, and when all of this incredible emotion spews from my whale's blowhole heart as I rise from my deep blue sleep of everyday life, I break water surface and Grandma, Grandma how I think of you sitting at the table cleaning pinto beans for supper that evening, how you worried, how you smiled, how you grimaced and how you went blind, your bones gnarled and crudely twisted with age, and you gradually rolled into a ball of ancient root-branch GOD-TREE for someone like me to hid under during storms, and I still do, Grandma - and this poem is my joy-song to you, sweet Grandma, you vitalize my tongue to lick the minerals of each day and become part of the earth as you were, you prick my heels to encourage me to take the toughest path, you whisper me to dream of love, to believe in myself, sitting there at the table in a small village on a summer afternoon, cleaning pinto beans, in every instance where I needed hope, love, help, this image of you keeps me strong, keeps me moving on. Book III - La Guerra Eight Breaking up is not like a Hollywood film, no rainy dark streets, no winds gusting at trees or leaves booming branches against wooden picket fences. There's the city in its awesome warring metal and rock and glass, so structured that weak are stepped on, drive to live in despair and labor. But to love in such a city? To reach out to another person and love that person through a crisis, wade knee-deep through doubt and fear, through your own cracked segments of life, your life falling about you in grand upheaval, to crunch your own cataclysmic epoch and reach, reach for someone to love, be loyal through the parading debris flung up at you in gay illusions, to find yourself among crowds and confusion, locate that strand and fiery fiber that shocks your sense, rusty and coiled, in to fierce and raging locomotion, spewing fire out your heart for the one you love, you love. Our passions are the fiery altars where we sacrifice the sweet gold of Reason, altars where we learn to believe in superior beings above, for when in love, one can look around and see no longer the straight line, instead all is crooked and craned and stressing to burst out like spring flowers where soldiers fall in bloody wounds and cannon roar and church bells mourn and sing their lonely dirges, when in love words carry that death, charge glowing in our breast, words burn their light through dark halls in our soul, words spoken by our lover puff at our dusty story of life, like an old book slapped open by wind from the window, and ruffling through yellow pages reading stories of our life. A man and a woman create a circle when they are in love, breaking the circle, one leaves out to utter black space, the other slowly watching the energy dim, crumbling, and the circle like a disc swirls maddeningly through space, an outer-space craft that will, when it lands, leave gaping craters smoldering in green grass. Those craters are the footsteps of lovers apart.  Now here's a poem from Laurel Lamperd, the second of our featured poets this week from Australia. Her poem was first published in Pixel Papers. Happy Families When I was twelve my father left. "He'll send for us when he's ready," my mother said who believed in him as we all did. Except for postcards in the first year I was forty when next I heard of him. My mother was dead. He had died of a heart attack in some little town in Queensland I'd never heard of.  My first poem this week is this next heroically titled piece written a couple of weeks ago at a time when i really felt like a rant but couldn't think of anything new to rant about. diddlysquat i already wrote a poem this morning but it's another rant and it's too nice a day and too early in this new year for a rant but goddammit i want to rant and so i will i'll rant about all the birds singing and the sun shining and the blue sky and the clear clean air and the good night's sleep that left me refreshed and reenergized and my nice house and my pets who follow me around with great brown eyes dripping with love and adoration and my wife who seems to like me ok and the fine dinner she made for me last night and my good prospects for a long and productive life and my computer and my fingers and my toes and my social security check and the tree i sit under when i feel my nature-boy self pining for the smell of squirrels and fragrant flowers and tickling blades of grass on my bare feet and my hair that hasn't fallen out yet and the dried beef sausage in the fridge and and the false teeth that make it possible for me to eat the dried beef sausage in the fridge and levis that fit tight and keep my butt from sagging and....well.... i could just go on and on and on some more with all the things i have to rant about, i could rant about the cows coming home and the cow farmers waiting for them at home and i could rant about the cows and their moon jumping milkshake making shenanigans and i could rant about words like shenanigans that i have to look up in the dictionary cause i can't spell diddlysquat and i could rant about diddlysquat... and often do... i could even rant about you, and and if i can, i do, so i do, i rant about you who got sucked into reading this on the false assumption i had something to say  Next, I have several short poems by Robert Bly. The poems are from Bly's book This Tree Will Be Here For A Thousand Years, published by Harper & Row in 1979. Frost Still on the Ground I walk out in the fields; the frost is still in the ground. It's like someone just beginning to write, and nothing has been said! The shadows that come from another life gather in folds around his head. So I am, all at once. What I have to say I have not said. The snow water glances up at the moon. It is its own pond. In its lake the serpent is asleep. Late Moon The third week moon reaches its light over my father's farm, half if it dark now, in the west that eats it away. The earth has rocks in that hum at early dawn. As I turn to go in, I see my shadow reach for the latch A Dream of Retarded Children This afternoon I had been fishing alone, strong wind, some water slopping in the back of the boat. I was far from home. Later I woke several times hearing geese. I dreamt I saw retarded children playing, and one came near. And her teacher, the face open, hair light. For the first time I forgot my distance, I took her in my arms and held her. Waking up, I felt how alone I was. I walked on the dock. Fishing alone in the far north. Black Pony Eating Grass Near me a black and shaggy pony is eating grass, that crunching is night being ripped away from day, a crystal's sound when it regains its twelve sides. Our life is a house between two hills. Flowers stand open on the altar, the moonlight hugs the sides of poppies. In a few years we will die, yet the grass continues to lift itself into the horse's teeth, sharp harsh lines run though our bodies. A star is also a stubborn man - the Great Bear is seven old men walking. The Fallen Tree After a long walk I come down to the shore. A cottonwood tree lies stretched out in the grass. This tree knocked down by lightning - and a hollow the owls made open now with rain. Disasters are all right, if they teach men and women to turn their hollow places up. The tree lies stretched out where it fell in the grass. It is so mysterious, waters below, waters above, so little of it we can never know.  Back now for the second poem by Sue Clennell for this week. The poem was first published by The Western Australian. Correspondent The day your letter came a rainbow spilled on the front porch. The black ink spidering across the envelope shouted my name then whispered it was for me, and unemployment and recession fell off a flat earth.  Going to finally, for the first time in my life, get a passport. Except for border trips to Mexico and Canada, I haven't traveled out of the United States in more than 40 years and that travel was on military orders, so no passport was needed. bananafanafofana i had a passport picture taken today a good double-duty deal - after the border agents take a look at the picture and arrest me as a terrorist the very same picture can be used again when they book me into that Cuba place, Guacamole or what ever Dee took me down to Walmart and set me down on the passport picture taking stool and i don't even know why i need a passport but i guess she'll tell me when we get wherever we're going and i don't much care - as long as it's a civilized country with coffee houses and internet and dependable WIFI being there won't interrupt my life, which i enjoy, by the way, too much to be running off to weird places like Upper Slobania or Botswanna or some bananafanafofana republic in South America, and i don't care how tasty their bananas are cause i don't even like bananas except with Corn Flakes and i expect nobody in those bananafanafofana countries has Corn Flakes except maybe the president and most of those guys would probably rather shoot you than share their Corn Flakes, so where would that leave me, well, with bananas and no Corn Flakes, that's where and the dude just cannot abide such a tilt-a-whirl existence as that  The next two poems are by Brooke Bergan, from her book, Storyville published by Asphodel Press in 1994. I've used poems from this book many times and have outlined the story of Storyville and the photographer Ernest J. Bellocq, a run-of-the-mill commercial photographer who, on his own, documented through his photographs the Storyville of his time and the prostitutes who lived and worked in it. The poems in the book are Bergan's reactions to the time and the place and Bellocq's photos of the whores. The "plate" numbers in the poem titles refer to Bellocq's photograph plate of the picture that inspired the poem. Plate 18: Cover Girl the breasts are familiar the wide hips flat stomach, a contemporary body, angles and bones and its own strange beauty held rigid sideways on a settee a false position beneath: light pubic hair, skin of the photo, smell familiar as my own, etched flaw, breasts, shoulder and hair gleam against pillow too many heads rested upon left hand curls instinctively fastidious touching as little as possible unknown hair trapped in the weave she lies left nipple trailing dangerously close to that rough darkness perhaps only another flaw the large, pale eyes accuse, resigned and unforgiving. Plate 20: Venus Leaning on a Dresser rises from a sea of silver foam (insect or fungus destroyed gelatin's bright dust beneath bare feet) back arched as wave from shore, floats (floats - motes in your eye, beauty not perfection stilled movement). Arched above itself a wave seems to hesitate, curls back into itself breaks into bright light flakes curls, and breaks again. reluctant goddess, wait for no one in your faded boudoir eyes averted from your visage in the mirror behind you the mirror you face, Cyprianna riding the wave some accident made after the fact, real now as the surgical scar curved on your stomach while we conspire photographer and poet through silence or speech to tease out beauty from you ravished stillness.  Next, another poem from out friend Laurel Lamperd, her second poem for this week. Borderline He said get rid of it and went up north shearing She couldn't remember their names There were two years between some less between others. Her eldest girl always had one on her hip. She escaped to the river to the moss covered rocks and wind driven trees to write a poem. The poem was for her friend dead from a backyard abortionist The last word she wrote was Freedom. The children who survived the homes and foster parents returned to search for her. The eldest girl looked under the moss seeing the word  Not a rant this next one, but more of a personal manifesto, a statement of the rules of language by which I write. forbidden i resist the idea of "forbidden" words because i think words are words and as a writer if i find that a particular word is the right word then i want to use it gloriously because, as writers know, finding the truly right word is a glorious thing in a world where the word is most often the nearly right word or maybe the wrong word altogether i think, once found, the right word should be used fearlessly but that doesn't mean all words are equal in their suitability i for example almost never use words like cunt or motherfucker or spic or nigger-lover or any such because i almost never write poems where those words are the right words, though some do write such poems that are good poems that use these words perfectly and i applaud both the excellence of the poems and the fierceness of the poets who commit to the requirements of the truth of their art for i believe truth is the first obligation of the artist and a word, if used as it should be used, is a form of truth and truth should never be denied or rendered forbidden  Next, I have a poem by Robert Penn Warren. The poem is from his book Rumor Verified, Poems 1979-1980, published by Random House. Dawn Dawnward, I wake. In darkness, wait. Wait for first light to seep in as sluggish and gray As tidewater fingering timbers in a long-abandoned hulk. In darkness I try to make out accustomed objects. But cannot. It is as though Their constituent atoms had gone to sleep and forgotten Their duty of identity. But at first Inward leakage of light they will stir To the mathematical dance of existence. Bookcase, Chest, chairs - they will dimly loom, yearn Toward reality. Are you Real when asleep? Or only when, Feet walking, lips talking, or Your member making its penetration, you Enact, in a well-designed set, that ectoplasmic Drama of laughter and tears, the climax of which always Strikes with surprise - though the script is tattered and torn? I think how ground mist is thinning, think How , distantly eastward, the line of dark woods can now Be distinguished from sky. Many Distinctions will grow, and some Will, the heart knows, be found Painful. On the far highway, A diesel grinds, groans on the grade. Can the driver see the color above the far woods yet? Or will dawn come today only as gray light through Clouds downward soaking, as from a dirty dishrag? I think of a single tree in a wide field. I wonder if, in this grayness, the tree will cast a shadow. I hold up my hand. I can vaguely see it. The hand. Far, far, a crow calls. In gray light I see my hand against he white ceiling. I move Fingers. I want to be real. Dear God, To Whom, in my triviality, I have given only trivial thought, Will I find it worthwhile to pray that You let The crow, as least once more, call?  Here's our friend Sue Clennell, with her third poem for this week. The poem first appeared in The Perfect Diary. In black and white Where my father wheeled me around, I now wheel him. Where my father fed me, I now feed him. Together we watch Buster Keaton, who sits on the handlebars and maneuvers through traffic, not realizing the cyclist has fallen off. Who sails a car in the water, slips on banana skins, and can only afford a dollar box of candy for his sweetheart. I always cry at sad movies.  I'm not one who likes to deliver ultimatums, but some times the nature in a situation requires it. or else the old coot in the booth down a-ways from me is being way more obnoxious than any old coot has a right to be, not to mention more obnox- ious than it's safe to be given the frail grip old coots have on the slippery slope of life not to mention my personal irritation at his behavior and the way it puts all us old coots in a bad light i think if we had a vote right here right now the old coot would be locked away in a nursing home in a new york minute not to mention i don't have a clue how long a new york minute is but i'm guessing it's fast since all the pictures i've ever seen of new york shows people rushing rushing rushing, not to mention i've never been in new york, not even for a new york minute, so i don't know for sure about any of this and like i said it's all guesswork oh, hell, now the spouse of coot has jumped into the fray, acting very cootish herself, complaining about something, gripe, gripe, gripe in her quivering coottie voice about the hollandaise sauce and i'm thinking holy cripes lady this is texas where complaining about the bar-b-que sauce is a god-given right but when it comes to hollandaise you should just be happy old jake the cook in the back knows what it is and if he thinks it needs a touch of jalopena well old jake is the cook and he gets to do it the way he wants so quit all your old coot complaining unless you want to brace old jake in the kitchen by his cook pot yourself and it's too dang hot in here - i don't know why people here have to turn their heaters up to 85 inside the minute it goes down to 55 outside not to mention i think i'm about a new york minute away from a heat stroke here and think i'll have to complain since i'm being driven out by the heat before i've even finished my second pot of coffee not to mention my butt's gone to sleep sitting here and it's going to look like i have a flat-as-a-pancake-butt when i walk out of here not to mention i've had 'bout eighteen cups of coffee since i got here and will need to go pee in a new york minute or else  I have two poems now by Naomi Shihab Nye from her book 19 Varieties of Gazelle - Poems of the Middle East. Nye, who currently lives in San Antonio, has received, among many other honors, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets and four Pushcart Prizes. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother in St. Louis in 1952, Nye has been writing about Jerusalem, the West Bank, and her family almost all of her life, while, at the same time, gathering and editing a number of anthologies of poetry from the Middle East. The Words Under the Words for Sitti Khadra, north of Jerusalem My grandmother's hands recognize grapes, the damp shine of a goat's new skin. When I was sick they followed me, I work from the long fever to find them covering my head like cool prayers. My grandmother's days are made of bread, a round pat-pat and the slow baking. She waits by the oven watching a strange car circle the streets. Maybe it holds her son, lost to America. More often, tourists, who kneel and weep at mysterious shrines. She knows how often mail arrives, how rarely there is a letter. When one comes, she announces it, a miracle, listening to read again and again in the dim evening light. My grandmother's voice says nothing can surprise her. Take her the shotgun wound and the crippled baby. She knows the spaces we travel through, the messages we cannot send - our voices are short and would get lost on the journey. Farewell to the husband's coat, the ones she has loved and nourished, who fly from her like seeds into a deep sky. They will plant themselves. We will all die. My grandmother's eyes say Allah is everywhere, even in death. When she speaks of the orchard and the new olive press, when she tells the stories of Joha and his foolish wisdoms, He is her first thought, what she really thinks of is His name. "Answer if you hear the words under the words - otherwise it is just a world with a lot of rough edges, difficult to get through, and our pockets full of stones." Lunch in Nablus City Park When you lunch in a town which has recently known war under a calm slate sky mirroring none of it, certain words feel impossible in the mouth. Casualty: too casual, it must be changed. A short man stacks mounds of pita bread on each end of the table, muttering something about more to come. Plump birds landing on park benches surely had their eyes closed recently, must have seen nothing of weapons or blockades. When the woman across from you whispers I don't think we can take ti anymore and you say there are people praying for her in the mountains of Himalaya and she says Lady, it is not enough, then what?  And now, the last poem for the week by our friend Laurel Lamperd. The poem first appeared in Small Packages, then won 1st prize in Biosphere. Pastures Green and lush were the pastures that spring when it rained and rained and the washing wouldn't dry and the children squabbled and fought in the house. This year the country is bare earth. Wind erodes sending dust storms eddying drunkenly across paddocks. The children want to dance inside them. The dust comes on a face today the day the trucks took the last of the sheep.  It's nice, early in the morning, to be superfluous to the goings and doings of the rest of the world. and all is good this morning still a half hour before sunrise, i pass a 7-car fender-bender on the loop, all cars safely moved to the shoulder, about a dozen people standing around, about half on their cell phones, all victims of rush-hour auto acrobatics, all pissed that their morning rush to wherever they have to be has been interrupted by that stupid whoever who jigged when he should have jagged leaving all these people upon whom the whole world depends for proper memo distribution, proper grocery shelf stocking, proper computer computing, proper nail hammering, proper frozen chicken delivering, proper real estate selling, proper ad-writing, all these rush-people essential to the daily turning of the earth and maintenance or gravity for us all, stranded now for who knows how long by that stupid whoever and his improperly timed jigging and jagging all these people with someplace to be, stuck where they are, as i pass by, slowly reveling in the torpitude of my don't-have-to-be-anywhere morning knowing all is good in my world this morning  The next two poems are by William Everson from his book The Residual Years, Poems 1934 - 1948, first published by New Directions in 1935. Early editions of the book included only mimeographed copies of poems written by Everson while in a work camp for conscientious objectors. When the 1949 edition was published, new poems from 1946, 1947, and 1948. My copy of the book, a 1968 edition, includes all those poems, plus earlier work and offered, for the first time in print, the complete poetic works of Everson prior to his becoming a Catholic and entering into the Dominican Order. For the remainder of his life he lived, wrote, and published as Brother Antoninus. Born in 1912, Brother Antoninus died in 1994, having become a leading figure in the San Francisco Beat movement of the 50s and 60s. Night Scene "After the war," he thought, "after the war - " And crossing, traveled the street at a long angle, So late it being and no traffic now, Blotched stars, Laid its mark on the moon: A halo's hoop. Pursed he his lips for a thick whistle, But felt the naked unutterable desolation of the sleeping city Breathing behind the shuttered shops; And saw the weak sign, The horse-turd ripe in the raw street; And mounting the curb Saw with that sudden cold constriction Soldier and girl, In their surd tussle, Sprawled in a jeweler's door. The Citadel The janitor knew; High priest of the wastebasket, Bridging the outer and inner worlds, The janitor knew - As did also the staff, The auditors and the higher clerks; Even the salesmen, Those casuals of the corridors - All knew, all knew but Norstrem, Who, blithe in his function, Worked on unaware. Resourceful, diligent, Abler no doubt than the men who survived him, Neither his special brilliance nor his general worth Would at last avail. For in the upper office, The citadel, The shrouded vault in the maze of rooms, The fabulous center he had not seen Nor could ever aspire to - There in that sanctum his fate was decreed. He worked for weeks, Absorbed and unknowing, Serene in his ignorance, Constructing his proper place in that world; Until the sharp morning, Cryptic with frost, His manager blandly summoned him in, And told him what all knew but he.  Next, here's the last poem for the week by Sue Clennell. The poem was first published in Quadrant. The Ink Drinker Jimmie Stewart once talked of an actor who always upstaged but this time this time he was told to just write a letter, while the other actor his big chance talked. He drank the ink, didn't he? Well I knew a woman the same. Couldn't take her anywhere, the spotlight shone on her in every scene. I taciturned at such functions, the rule had been carved and grained into me like an old school desk, you can't beat an ink drinker.  I'll have my normal breakfast this morning - eggs over easy and philosophy, all the usual. a minor poet explains it all i'm eating breakfast north-faced today, unusual, because normally i sit at the booth at the other end, the one next to the electric plug, where i face south as i eat this morning that booth was taken by another south-faced, keyboard clicking diner, leaving me at this end, in the only other booth next to an electric plug where i now face breakfast facing north i'm not sure what effect this will have on the gastro-dynamics of my egg over easy and extra-crispy bacon but it does present a subtly different view which, could have far-reaching psychological effects those, like me, who normally eat breakfast facing toward the south face the oncoming traffic on the interstate, while those, like me today, who eat breakfast facing north face interstate traffic going away a reason, i believe, why south-facing diners are usually highly motivated people with the supreme confidence required to write meaningless, totally trivial, poetry while north-facing diners often suffer from abandonment issues and are frequent victims of depression  I have a poem now by Anne Sexton from her book To Bedlam and Part Way Back, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960. Anne Sexton, born in Massachusetts in 1928, won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. A sufferer of deep depressions, she took her own life in 1974, after many pprevious attempts. Her Kind I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at the villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where you flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where you wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die.  It has occurred to me that the more I write, the more restricted becomes the range of my subject matter the deer and the pigs and me, again i used to write about lots of different things but, lately, i seem to be writing mostly about myself which would be OK if i was a more interesting guy but i'm not and i know the tolerance level to me is declining even to me so how to get out of this me-rut - think of things that are interesting or beautiful to me but not about me, like the herd of deer i saw yesterday evening on the hillside pasture across the interstate - the tranquility of the deer grazing in early dusk a contrast to the moving necklace of headlights, fast-moving lights, workers on their way home to family and dinner and Tuesday-night television - the deer placidly and fully fed and entertained by their dinner on the hill and i'm reminded of the evening about this time coming home from Kerrville on this same interstate cresting a hill as i rounded a curve coming face to wet brown nose with another herd of deer in the middle of the highway - probably the most skillful driving and i've ever done, getting safely through and around the herd, first frozen in my headlights, then in panic, scattering with great leaps in every direction, mindless in their fear - the best driving i've ever done except one time, maybe a dream, maybe for real, when i had the same experience with a group of pigs on a farm-to-market road, waddling porkers instead of fleet-footed deer - but here we are again, back to where we started, talking about me again and my dreams  And, so we're finished for the week.As usual, all of the material presented in this blog remains the property of its creators. And, also as usual, all of my stuff is availaable should anyone want it, with the sole proviso that the source be identified. I am allen itz, owner and producer of this blog, and I say so. |
||||
|
||||
| Archives May 2006 June 2006 July 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 November 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 November 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 June 2008 July 2008 August 2008 September 2008 October 2008 November 2008 December 2008 January 2009 February 2009 March 2009 April 2009 May 2009 June 2009 July 2009 August 2009 September 2009 October 2009 November 2009 December 2009 January 2010 February 2010 March 2010 April 2010 May 2010 June 2010 July 2010 August 2010 September 2010 October 2010 November 2010 December 2010 January 2011 February 2011 March 2011 April 2011 May 2011 June 2011 July 2011 August 2011 September 2011 October 2011 November 2011 December 2011 January 2012 February 2012 |
||||
|
||||
| Links Loch Raven Review Mindfire Renewed Holy Groove Records Tryst Poems Niederngasse BlazeVOX Eclectica Michaela Gabriel's In.Visible.Ink zafusy The Blogging Poet Poetsarus.Com Wild Poetry Forum Blueline Poetry Forum The Writer's Block Poetry Forum The Word Distillery Poetry Forum Gary Blankenship The Hiss Quarterly Thunder In Winter, Snow In Summer Lawrence Trujillo Artsite Arlene Ang The Comstock Review Thane Zander Pitching Pennies The Rain In My Purse Dave Ruslander S. Thomas Summers Clif Keller's Music Vienna's Gallery Shawn Nacona Stroud Beau Blue Downside up Dan Cuddy Christine Kiefer David Anthony Layman Lyric Scott Acheson Christopher George James Lineberger Joanna M. Weston Desert Moon Review Octopus Beak Inc. Wrong Planet...Right Universe Poetry and Poets in Rags Teresa White Camroc Press Review The Angry Poet |
Post a Comment