fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

David Eggleton
The Weather Bomb
February began with firewatch skies,
a glare that flared off of hot metal cans,
gangs of lawn-mowers chanting mantras,
and an anticyclone calm which lasted for days.


Then came a sky that swelled like sludge.
Slowly, as if lockjawed, on the bludge,
rain fronted up just to lair about,
before turning whirling dervish on Valentine’s Day.


All night the storm bustled, strong as a haka.
Dawn sobbed out stories of baby raindrops,
backpacked in from the Tasman Sea blast zone,
only to thump down hard on Wellington.


{first stanzas of long poem by New Zealand poet David Eggleton}

[quasimodo1]

~GEORGE EKLUND~





HOMAGE TO JIM



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



At the broken gate
Of the supreme composition
He could not come to the phone.
The radiation had burned his throat.
I reasoned he didn't have to say a thing.
For the affected there is no plot.
The radiation had burned the cranial nerves. {excerpt/beginning lines, from the Valparaiso Poetry Review}

[quasimodo1]

-How Despair may be Transformed into a Diamond-
As payment for your colour storm
An acid sky blackens every flower.
You feel your breath touching down
And hold on to the voice you know
On each lip corner, two now frozen
Hedges to your country.

{first stanza of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

-Emily Noether's Theorem-

Poets are divided according to the rivers
That are closest to their home. He glances
At the lance in the lance-rack,
At his ago, the site of a single-hearth house,
Which must come down in the bloomed fields,
Thorns, earth broom and overgrown grass.

{first stanza of this poem...from the publication Masthead}

[quasimodo1]

The Wissahickon spills endlessly, like the night love poured through me, nearly, I thought,
uncontainable as it rushed from my fingers and out the window into people passing on the street,
over fire hydrants, pigeons, and boom boxes, through police cars, stop signs, and cockroaches,
between two dogs circling in heat. I did not need an answer then.
I would have understood the indifferent delight of the ducks. But I asked,
and my question scattered like mercury, into a million trembling globules
magnetic with yearning.

-- Deidra Greenleaf Allan
{ending of a poem called "Vigils: The Night Watch"}

[quasimodo1]

JMW TURNER



In 1842, unable to still his panic

at the stormcloud that was about to

consume the 19th Century,

John Ruskin invented JMW Turner,

who, in turn, invented light.

Not the light of the Sistine or Toledo

but the clouded light of an eye for gravity,

a love of particles and suspense,

the light we see and are seen through.



Ruskin learned his art on a rug,

on his hands and knees, alone.

There is pattern in discipline

and in the reverse.

There should be in this letter

I have tried to write for a year; always interrupted

by rumors of wars and your latest.

Alone now, I start again, arranging proportions,

diminishing loss. I will finish.

Turner did his best with age,

when he could hardly see at all.

With a flourish, I keep this:

{first part of this poem published in the Adirondack Review}

[quasimodo1]

{from the Paris Review}
Issue 178, Fall 2006



Tension

“Never use the word suddenly just to
create tension.”
—Writing Fiction

Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
outside in the garden,
and suddenly I was in the study
looking up the word oligarchy for the thirty-seventh time.

When suddenly, without warning,
you planted the last petunia in the flat,
and I suddenly closed the dictionary
now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.

{beginning stanzas of this poem/ two new poems by Billy Collins can be found in this issue}

[quasimodo1]

Visitations
{from the Paris Review}
Issue 172, Winter 2004


There in the shrine at Lourdes
Embellished with old crutches, splints, and canes
(Freely abandoned by the cured,
The scoured of sins, the shorn and healed of pains)

It is said the Madonna once
Cloaked in compassionate blue and full of grace,
Showed up from nowhere there in France,
Conferring a special virtue on that place;

And that at scattered sites
Throughout the world (though only, be it said,
Where the faithful worshiped and their rites
All were observed) appearances were made.

{Three stanzas from the start of this longish poem by the late Anthony Hecht} {http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A53133-2004Oct21.html ...obituary}

[quasimodo1]

{Kenyan Review, Winter 2006, volume XXVIII, NUMBER ONE..first part of this long poem by Meena Alexamder}


Torn Grass


Childhood is a hot country, Amma lives there.
The sky has turned the color of torn grass.

Remember the calf dragged away to Chenganacheri Fair?
Tiny tottering thing, snout wet with gooseberry juice.

You crouched in the dirt, staring and staring ,
Refused to come back in.

We had spiced pomfret, mangoes so ripe their sweat
Stained the damask tablecloth my dying mother left me.

Your grandfather’s shadow hit the veranda.
He sat in his armchair, chewing on a cheroot.

Clouds swelled the mirror, broke its rosewood frame.
I saw my dead mother.

[quasimodo1]

EPISTLE TO NERUDA
Superb,
Like a seasoned lion,
Neruda buys bread in the shop.
He asks for it to be wrapped in paper
And solemly puts it under his arm:
"Let someone at least think
that at some time
I bought a book…"
Waving his hand in farewell,
like a Roman
rather dreamily royal,
in the air scented with mollusks,
oysters,
rice,
he walks with the bread through Valparaiso.
He says:
" Eugenio, look!
You see--
over there, among the puddles and garbage,
standing up under the red lamps
stands Bilbao-with the soul
of a poet -- in bronze.
Bilbao was a tramp and a rebel.
Originally
they set up the monument, fenced off
by a chain, with due pomp, right in the center,
although the poet had lived in the slums.
{First one fifth of this long poem by Yevgeny Yevtushenko}

[quasimodo1]

A Sudden Rain in the Green Mountains



for Jessica Bennett

Plush hills, the raw materials, fall away.

The soaking clay

In which the serried oaks, the picturesque

And swaybacked pines, elected to evolve,

The famous marble in its bare reserve,


Vanish like guesses in these verticals

Whose heft at dusk

Blurs rooks to ridges, veils the bicycles

And splashes where they lean hard into curves.

Looming like crowds, such weather makes its world;

{First two stanzas of this poem by Stephan Burt, cr from the Boston Review, 1993-2005, subtitle to this publication...A Political and Literary Forum}

[quasimodo1]

Inspiration

The common paths by which we walk and wind
Unheedful, but perhaps to wish them done,
Though edged with brier and clotbur, bear behind
Such leaves as Milton wears or Shakespeare won.
Still, could we look with clear poetic faith,
No day so desert but a footway hath,
Which still explored, though dimly traced it turn,
May yet arrive where gates of glory burn:
Nay, scarce an hour of all the shining twelve
But to the inmost sight may ope a valve
On those hid gardens where the great of old
Walked from the world and their sick hearts consoled
{first lines of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

MÖBIUS, The Poetry Magazine 2007



THE LAST ALGONQUIN IN OUR VILLAGE
The sun rises with its concomitant clarities.
It is Columbus Day, and the last Algonquin brave
In our village fondly paddles his kayak along
A bay-like inlet up the Hudson River
Where a swan, iceberg white, fastidious as
A ghost, rides the waves like a ballerina.
She is no pet, but she deigns to accept a plum
Our Indian disembarks and sits outside
His house and works on a pair of moccasins
For me, his only customer. ...

{excerpt from this poem}

[quasimodo1]

The Monster of Mr Cogito


1

Lucky Saint George
from his knight's saddle
could exactly evaluate
the strength and movements of the dragon

the first principle of strategy
is to assess the enemy accurately

Mr Cogito
is in a worse position
he sits in the low
saddle of a valley
covered with thick fog

through fog it is impossible to perceive
fiery eyes
greedy claws
jaws

through fog
one sees only
the shimmering of nothingness



{excerpt from the beginning of this long poem}

[quasimodo1]

THE CITY LIMITS
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue...
{first stanzas of this poem}

[Virgil]

A.R. Ammons is an undervalued poet. He's got some really fine poetry.

[quasimodo1]

Hey Virgil, been taking a good look at this guy for awhile now. He has the pedigree from heaven...all the best schools, big time professor and prolific poet who is amazingly down on the earth. Think I have a book you might enjoy... send it in a bit. quasi

[quasimodo1]

A new review of a collection of poems. Review title..."Formalities" by James Longenbach... Poems by Mary Jo Salter in her new book "A Phone Call to the Future" (new and selected poemms). Fragments of her work within this review. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/books/review/Longenbach-t.html?ref=books# [cr: nytimes]

[quasimodo1]

CALLED INTO PLAY



Fall fell: so that's it for the leaf poetry:
some flurries have whitened the edges of roads

and lawns: time for that, the snow stuff: &
turkeys and old St. Nick: where am I going to

find something to write about I haven't already
written away: I will have to stop short, look

down, look up, look close, think, think, think:
but in what range should I think: should I

figure colors and outlines, given forms, say
mailboxes, or should I try to plumb what is

{first few couplets of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

CONSOLATION


Darwin.
They say he read novels to relax,
But only certain kinds:
nothing that ended unhappily.
If anything like that turned up,
enraged, he flung the book into the fire.


True or not,
I’m ready to believe it.


Scanning in his mind so many times and places,
he’d had enough of dying species,
the triumphs of the strong over the weak,
the endless struggles to survive,
all doomed sooner or later.
He’d earned the right to happy endings,
at least in fiction
with its diminutions.
{first few lines by this Polish poet, mentioned by another poster}

[quasimodo1]

MAKE IFA

Make Ifa make Ifa make Ifa Ifa Ifa
In sanctified chalk
of my silver painted soot
In criss-crossing whelps
of my black belching smoke
In brass masking bones
of my bass droning moans
in hub cap bellow
of my hammer tap blow
In steel stance screech
of my zumbified flames
In electrified mouth
of my citified fumes
In bellified groan
of my countrified pound
In compulsivefied conga
of my soca moka jumbi
MAKE IFA MAKE IFA MAKE IFA IFA

IFA

{this first part of Jayne Cortez' poem is something possibly beyond analysis but it's tribal sound is way out there}

[quasimodo1]

That is the title of this review by Dan Chiasson. The work discussed is "The Best American Erotic Poems" an anthology edited by David Lehman. subtitle: "from 1800 to the present", 300pp Scribner Poetry $30 I think I'll let the buyers of this collection find the fragments for themselves. In the review, which describes the book as something of a competition, W.H.Auden wins hands down. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/books/review/Chiasson-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bu&oref=slogin#

[quasimodo1]

Speaking To You (From Rock Bottom)


Speaking to you
this hour
these days when
I have lost the feather of poetry
and the rains
of separation
surround us tock
tock like Go tablets

Everyone has learned
to move carefully...
{introductory lines to a great poem}

[quasimodo1]

THROWN FOR A LOOP


There's so much more belief than truth, and
that is lucky in a way, belief inclining us

more toward what we need than what we'll get:
but we really do believe what we believe and

we hope it will work out: but put a plug of
gold on the scale opposite a sack full of

painted feathers, truth will that great woven
cluster outweigh: the fulcrum could be called

"getting along"--and that's where balanced
persons no doubt stand:
{first couplets of this poem, from the collection, "Glare"}

[quasimodo1]

...I won't be longer on the porch
than it takes to look out once
and see what I've taught myself
in two months here to discern:
night restoring its opacities,
though for an instant as intense
and evanescent as waking from a dream
of eating blackberries and almost
being able to remember it, I think
I see the parts -- haze, dusk, light
broken into grains, fatigue,
the mineral dark of the White Mountains,
the wavering shadows steadying themselves --
separate, then joined, then seamless:
the way, in fact, Frost's great poems,
like all great poems, conceal
what they merely know, to be
predicaments... {from ON THE PORCH AT THE FROST PLACE, FRANCONIA, NH excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Walk

February on the narrow beach, 3:oo
A.M. I set out south. Cape Cod Light
on its crumbling cliff above me turns
its wand of light so steadily
it might be tolling a half-life,
it might be the second-hand
of a schoolroom clock,
a kind of blind radar.

These bluffs deposited by glaaciers
are giving themselves away
to the beaches down the line, three
feet of coastline a year. I follow
them south at my own slow pace.
Ahead my grandfather died
in a boat and my father
found him and here I come.
{first two stanzas of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

MAKING YOUR OWN ECLIPSE
The word comes from a Greek word
for ‘abandonment’: we catch an untraceable
fire already kindled in another.

When night falls suddenly
for such a short period
in the clearest skies of the day

as a second darkening,
they could not have known
that what they were seeing was the Moon

acting as a screen.
For blue does not mean
its sensation in us, but the power

in it, the behaviour of the aligning
light in the pleasure-journey
of the obedient morning.

Across Ireland the blueness will drop
to temperatures of dusk,
a gentle east wind

will blow birds silent,
and stars along the Path
of Totality will decorate
{excerpt from this poem}

[JBI]

Persimmons by Li-Young Lee

In sixth grade Mrs. Walker
slapped the back of my head
and made me stand in the corner
for not knowing the difference
between persimmon and precision.
How to choose

persimmons. This is precision.
Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted.
Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one
will be fragrant. How to eat:
put the knife away, lay down the newspaper.
Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat.
Chew on the skin, suck it,
and swallow. Now, eat
the meat of the fruit,
so sweet
all of it, to the heart.

Donna undresses, her stomach is white.
In the yard, dewy and shivering
with crickets, we lie naked,
face-up, face-down,
I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten.
Ni, wo: you me.
I part her legs,
remember to tell her
she is beautiful as the moon.

Continued here: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1245.html

[quasimodo1]

ELEGY

Poems.

By Mary Jo Bang.

92 pp. Graywolf Press. $20 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Orr3-t.html?ref=books.

[quasimodo1]

TURN THANKS TO MISS MIRRY
ill-tempered domestic helper who hated me.
She said that she had passed through hell bareheaded.
and that a whitening ash from hell’s furnace

had sifted down upon her and that is why she gray early.
Called me “Nana.” Nanny’s name I have come to love.
She twisted her surname Henry into Endry
in her railing against the graceless state of her days.

She was the repository of 400 years of resentment
for being uprooted and transplanted, condemned
to being a stranger on this side of a world
where most words would not obey her tongue. {first three stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Fugard-t.html?ref=review ---FROM HARVEY RIVER

A Memoir of My Mother and Her Island.

By Lorna Goodison.

Illustrated. 288 pp. Amistad/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95.

Related
First Chapter: ‘From Harvey River’ (March 30, 2008) ----------------------------------Lorna Goodison (born 1947) is a Jamaican poet -----“I’m a poet, but I didn’t choose poetry—it chose me […] it’s a dominating, intrusive tyrant. It’s something I have to do—a wicked force.” --I Am Becoming My Mother

[quasimodo1]

William Matthews (1942-1997) quote describing the four thematic categories of

published poetry: "1. I went out into the woods today and it made me feel, you

know, sort of religious. 2. We're not getting any younger 3. It sure is cold and

lonely (a) without you, honey, or (b) with you, honey. 4. Sadness seems to be the

other side of the coin of happiness, and vice versa, and in any case the coin is too

soon spent on we know not what."

[quasimodo1]

NO RETURN
I like divorce. I love to compose
letters of resignation; now and then
I send one in and leave in a lemon-
hued Huff or a Snit with four on the floor.
Do you like the scent of a hollyhock?
To each his own. I love a burning bridge.
{first stanza}

[quasimodo1]

BETWEEN HURRICANES
As we slide into the 3rd world we have created,
running from hurricanes,
with our SS# indelibly inked on our arms
storms swell and swallow our control.

I am flooded with life review,
the beliefs of my youth.
I reach for my first Bible
which has survived every move.
I am mystified by Revelation’s
hallucinations again.
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"Hamlet Off-Stage: Neutrinos Explain Suck-Uppers"
Neutrinos do zip but swap back and forth
into each other, much like Rosypoop
and Guildendoo do. For years it was thought
neutrinos hung out weightless as R&G.
No longer. Scientists have discovered
neutrinos possess mass. Though invisible,
neutrinos weigh as much as all the stars.
How could I have thought the R & G twins
weightless? ... {excerpt}

[stlukesguild]

I haven't been reading much contemporary poetry as of late... to be honest, I haven't been reading much of anything as of late, focusing my time upon my current artistic efforts (although I have done some reading of various Hebrew Biblical texts as part of this body of work). Nevertheless... Geoffrey Hill is one of the few living poets who continues to speak to me. For all the reputation of John Ashberry I find myself somewhat unconvinced... But there is something... heavier... weightier... something suggesting a real gravitas in Hill's work. Even his language and syntax suggest something of a more muscular Anglo-Saxon strain of English... English without the fluid ease of the French influences. English that recalls the heft of Milton, Hopkins, Beowulf...:

IV.
Between bay window and hedge the impenetrable holly
strikes up again taut wintry vibrations.
The hellebore is there still,
half-buried; the crocuses are surviving.
From the front room I might be able to see
the coal fire's image planted in a circle
of cut-back rose bushes. Nothing is changed
by the strength of this reflection.

XI.
Above Dunkirk, the sheared anvil-
head of the oil-smoke column, the wind
beginning to turn, turning on itself, spiralling,
shaped on it's potter's wheel. But no fire-storm:
such phenomena were as yet unvisited
upon Judeo-Christian-Senecan Europe.
It is to Daniel, as to our own
tragic satire, that one returns
for mastery of the business; well-timed,
intermitted terror. How else recall
Mierendorff's ancient, instant, final cry__
madness___ in Leipzig, out of the sevenfold
fiery furnace?

XIII.
Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?
Who can now tell what was taken, or where,
or how, or whether it was received:
how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-
laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,
rotted down with leafmould, accepted
as civic concrete, reinforceable
base cinderblocks:
tipped into Danude, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up
with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,
Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringingly a capella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?

-from The Triumph of Love
Geoffrey Hill

[JBI]

from TORNADOS by Thylias Moss

Truth is, I envy them
not because they dance; I out jitterbug them
as I'm shuttled through and through legs
strong as looms, weaving time. They
do black more justice than I, frenzy
of conductor of philharmonic and electricity, hair
on end, result of the charge when horns and strings release
the pent up Beethoven and Mozart. Ions played

instead of notes. The movement
is not wrath, not hormone swarm because
I saw my first forming above the church a surrogate
steeple. The morning of my first baptism and
salvation already tangible, funnel for the spirit
coming into me without losing a drop, my black
guardian angel come to rescue me before all the words

continued here: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/moss/online.htm

[JBI]

from Codicil by Derek Walcott

Schizophrenic, wrenched by two styles,
one a hack's hired prose, I earn
me exile. I trudge this sickle, moonlit beach for miles,

tan, burn
to slough off
this live of ocean that's self-love.

To change your language you must change your life.

I cannot right old wrongs.
Waves tire of horizon and return.
Gulls screech with rusty tongues

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/derek_walcott/poems/11267

[JBI]

from Those who thoroughly Bed the Estuary by Jay Wright


Those who thoroughly bed
the estuary
...............know
the value of relation,
the inflection and formal
variation
............water knows
...................from air.
Clearly,
everything consists
in the determinate word,
the order of one, two, three;
no tricky exclusion concerns us—
not here, not ever.

continued here: http://www.versedaily.org/bedtheestuary.shtml

[JBI]

from Adolescence II by Rita Dove

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the washbowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/rita_dove/poems/2201

[quasimodo1]

On Reading Crowds and Power



1


Cloven, we are incorporate, our wounds
simple but mysterious. We have
some wherewithal to bide our time on earth.
Endurance is fantastic; ambulances
battling at intersections, the city
intolerably en fête. My reflexes
are words themselves rather than standard
flexures of civil power. In all of this
Cassiopeia's a blessing
as is steady Orion beloved of poets.
Quotidian natures ours for the time being
I do not know
how we should be absolved or what is fate. {first stanza}

[quasimodo1]

The Schooner Flight


1 Adios, Carenage


In idle August, while the sea soft,
and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim
of this Caribbean, I blow out the light
by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion
to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight.
Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn,
I stood like a stone and nothing else move
but the cold sea rippling like galvanize
and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof,
till a wind start to interfere with the trees.
I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard
as I went downhill, and I nearly said:
“Sweep soft, you witch, ’cause she don’t sleep hard,”
but the ***** look through me like I was dead.
A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on.
The driver size up my bags with a grin:
“This time, Shabine, like you really gone!”
I ain’t answer the ***, I simply pile in
the back seat and watch the sky burn
above Laventille pink as the gown
in which the woman I left was sleeping,
and I look in the rearview and see a man
exactly like me, and the man was weeping
for the houses, the streets, that whole ****ing island. ------------------{1st stanza of this long poem}

[quasimodo1]

Mr. Matthews was asked whether his work was the poetry of experience. He answered: ''Well, it's certainly not the poetry of innocence. Life happens to us whether we have the good sense to be interested in the way it happens to us or not. That's what it means to be alive."

[quasimodo1]

In Memory of the Utah Stars

Each of them must have terrified
his parents by being so big, obsessive
and exact so young, already gone
and leaving, like a big tipper,
that huge changeling's body in his place.
The prince of bone spurs and bad knees.

The year I first saw them play
Malone was a high school freshman,
already too big for any bed,
14, a natural resource.
You have to learn not to
apologize, a form of vanity.
You flare up in the lane, exotic
anywhere else. You roll the ball
off fingers twice as long as your
girlfriend's. Great touch for a big man,
says some jerk. Now they're defunct
and Moses Malone, boy wonder at 19,
rises at 20 from the St. Louis bench,
his pet of a body grown sullen
as fast as it grew up.
------------------------------------{excerpt}

[JBI]

from Digging by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pin rest; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

continued here: http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/seamus_heaney/poems/12699

[quasimodo1]

From the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, a slideshow of first editions..... http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/04/05/books/05poetry-slideshow_index.html including Eliot's Prufrock, Levertoff and Plath.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/29/books/29poet.html?ex=1254196800&en=536bdea0f6d77752&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland -- Super-bibliophile Danowski gives his collection to Emory University.

[quasimodo1]

"Mantilla"

My resurrective verses shed people
and reinforced each summer.
I saw their time as my own time,
I said, this day will penetrate
those other days, using a thorn
to remove a thorn in the harness
of my mind where anyone's touch
stemmed my dreams.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

To the Author of Glare


...but I wander from the main point: the main point is one
among many dots so fine you need a microscope to see them


but then they multiply like germs: the work of the deepest cells
is ergonomically incorrect, but effective nevertheless, like
my footprints in the snow leading to you, who would be my father


if this were a dream and I on the verge of waking up somewhere
other than home: but the hours remain ours, though they
were gone almost as soon as they arrived, hat and coat in hand.


--David Lehman {"Glare" is a poetry collection by A.R.Ammons} {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Isla Mujeres

The shoal we saw from the boat was fish;
it parted as I dove through, and formed
again overhead, each fish
like a dancing molecule in a rock.
On the flight to Merida we came down
through clouds that looked like brains
or scrambled eggs, but they were only
wisps and down we came. I'd swim
back up a chimney of fish and break,

already squinting, back into bright air.
If love is curiosity, I loved those fish. ...
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE UNQUIET CITY
we are succulents
our cool jade arms open
over clean tables our fine bone
china minds pull the strings
of our tongues together we plait
our thoughts with the television
back through the aerials and
transmission towers prodding
through the literal fog
the mechanics of which distance
does not startle us or the ears
pretend to hear the telephone
the page also wearies
us we have taken the meaning
out of things by laying them face to
face in our dictionary of emotions
we are so entirely alone that we
are unaware of it
and we enjoy the religion of solitude
because religions are at base
meaningless and we can turn
from them to a new hobby
to clean ashtrays or emptier
whiskey glasses we the women
of our building Margaret Gladys
Cecily Ida Eileen and I have
the cleanest washing on our block
we are proud and air our sheets
although it's a long time since
any serious stain or passionate figment
seeped through that censorious cloth...
{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Sudden Rain in the Green Mountains



for Jessica Bennett

Plush hills, the raw materials, fall away.

The soaking clay

In which the serried oaks, the picturesque

And swaybacked pines, elected to evolve,

The famous marble in its bare reserve,


Vanish like guesses in these verticals

Whose heft at dusk

Blurs rooks to ridges, veils the bicycles

And splashes where they lean hard into curves.

Looming like crowds, such weather makes its world;


Its crash and draft and spate and uniform

Consonant force confirm

Or mean-not that without you there are no

Attainments I can care for or call good-

But that among them, missing you, I know

How much delight, green need ... {excerpt...poem by Stephen Burt} -------

http://bostonreview.net/BR24.1/burt.html

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/books/review/Longenbach-t.html# ---Review entitled "The Wasted Land" by James Longenbach....of Jorie Graham's new book called "Sea Change" (Poems) subtitle...review dated 4/6/08

[quasimodo1]

The title of this review is "Poet's Choice" by Mary Karr (4/13/08)...there will be no comment by this writer...it seems Nicanor is into "anti-poetry". http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/04/10/AR2008041003233.html

[quasimodo1]

Heather McHugh (b. 1948) from the poem "What He Thought" This poem is more powerful in its entirety by an exponent. Here is an excerpt. "...We last Americans__were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there__we sat and chated, sat and chewed, __till, sensible it was our last__big chance to be poetic, make__our mark, one of us asked__'What's poetry?___Is it the fruits and vegetables and__marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or__the statue there?' Because I was__the glib one. I identified the answer__instantly, I didn't have to think--'The truth is both, it's both,' I blurted out. But that__was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed taught me something about difficulty,__for our underestimated host spoke out,__all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said: The statue represents Giordano Bruno, brought to be burned in the public square__because of his offense against__authority, which is to say__the Church. His crime was his belief__the universe does not revolve around__the human being: God is no__fixed point or central government, but rather is__poured in waves through all things. All things__move. 'If God is not the soul itself, he is__the soul of the soul of the world.' Such was__his heresy. The day they brought him__forth to die, they feared he might__incite the crowd (the man was famous__for his eloquence). And so his captors__placed upon his face__an iron mask, in which__he could not speak. That's__how they burned him. That is how he died: without a word, in front__of everyone. And poetry...(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to__the man in gray; he went on__softly)-- poetry is what....he thought, but did not say." 1994 q1

[quasimodo1]

Reviewing Three Portraits
by Madeline DeFrees


Two clocks out of synch watch faces of night
drift by. One face, a lacquered saint, dredged up
from a trunk, wrapped in virgin wool, black
robes of justice trapped in the vault of a bank.
An 18-karat guarantee of stainless steel and

peerless
dentistry, though you'd have to pry the mouth

open
to discover that. A high-priced portrait

photographer
in Chicago crossed her nervous hands on a Rule

Book
and said, "Don't smile!"

Steel girders support the lifted face, the smoky hair
and smoky voice exhaling clouded lines. A

four-wheel
drive studio, props in every back street
and a live camera that really moved. Peeling paint,
thin pulse in the temple, faint warnings of early
snow: shadows, assurance, perspective. Nothing
has been left out of this head shot because it was

not
pretty. He said, "Let your hair blow anywhere it

wants
and go right on shouting your poems."

------------
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleID=186
{excerpt} --

[quasimodo1]

Tie Your Heart at Night to Mine

Tie your heart at night to mine, love,
and both will defeat the darkness
like twin drums beating in the forest
against the heavy wall of wet leaves.

Night crossing: black coal of dream
that cuts the thread of earthly orbs
with the punctuality of a headlong train
that pulls cold stone and shadow endlessly. {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

In the Land of the Inheritance

"In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes."

Judges 19-21
A foreigner and his *** and concubine
were huddling in the square as night came on;

around them, veil on veil of dust that hoof
and staff and sandal could only disturb enough

to show how calmly it was sifting down
into a darkening sabbath of its own.

Surely here, he thought, among the Benjamites
someone would ask him in to spend the night,

and he, a holy man, the lord's anointed,
chosen among the chosen. But while he waited,

merchants and tradesmen, young and old alike,
all hurried by without a word or look

to their own dwellings as if he wasn't there,
and only the ache from having come so far,

his sharpening hunger and the night's chill
told him he was not invisible.

His concubine kept silent, her veiled head bowed,
since it was her fault they were stranded now:

Hadn't she tried to run away from him
back to her father's house in Bethlehem,

and when he came to get her, her father said,
My son, my son, and gave him wine and bread,

and blessed him, and then told the girl, Go home.
So now he glowered at her. See what you've done,

impious woman, see what your unclean ways
have brought us to, he was about to say

when an old man who pitied their distress
said, "Peace be to you, friend, come to my house,

I'll give you food for hunger, wine for thirst,
come to my house, I'll care for all your wants."

Now as they ate and drank, as their hearts grew merry,
the townsmen gathered together in a fury

outside the old man's house and beat his door,
and yelled, "Old man, give us the sojourner

that we may know him, give him to us now."
The old man pleaded, "Leave the man alone, ...


{excerpt} -- http://bostonreview.net/BR19.6/inheritance.html

[abdullah kurraz]

David Eggleton
The Weather Bomb
February began with firewatch skies,
a glare that flared off of hot metal cans,
gangs of lawn-mowers chanting mantras,
and an anticyclone calm which lasted for days.


Then came a sky that swelled like sludge.
Slowly, as if lockjawed, on the bludge,
rain fronted up just to lair about,
before turning whirling dervish on Valentine’s Day.


All night the storm bustled, strong as a haka.
Dawn sobbed out stories of baby raindrops,
backpacked in from the Tasman Sea blast zone,
only to thump down hard on Wellington.


{first stanzas of long poem by New Zealand poet David Eggleton}

it seems that you have a great command of expressing the true self of current human being wherever he/she is. It is a mixture of individual and collective feelings and visions that dominate the world as nature leaves it impacts on us - human beings - with our true and factual experiences and actions on daily basis. the language is rhetoric and influential without ambiguity or any sort of distortion. Here, we see a figurative poetic language that truly depicts poetic moments. It could also be a crucible of romantic features and realistic ones where the poet finds every thing beautiful and meaningful.

Best
Dr Abdullah Kurraz

[abdullah kurraz]

A Sudden Rain in the Green Mountains



for Jessica Bennett

Plush hills, the raw materials, fall away.

The soaking clay

In which the serried oaks, the picturesque

And swaybacked pines, elected to evolve,

The famous marble in its bare reserve,


Vanish like guesses in these verticals

Whose heft at dusk

Blurs rooks to ridges, veils the bicycles

And splashes where they lean hard into curves.

Looming like crowds, such weather makes its world;


Its crash and draft and spate and uniform

Consonant force confirm

Or mean-not that without you there are no

Attainments I can care for or call good-

But that among them, missing you, I know

How much delight, green need ... {excerpt...poem by Stephen Burt} -------

http://bostonreview.net/BR24.1/burt.html

a very influential portrait where every thing is poetic mingled with the geo-poetics which is rife in the lines and their meaningful shadows and significant indications or denotations. also, the poem here is composed in a dialogic / conversational manner, with its poetic construction and content. Language is clear and themes are attainable.
Thanks
Best
Dr Abdullah kurraz

[quasimodo1]

To abdullah kurraz: It seems you have a firm grasp on contemporary poetry yourself, Doc. Surely you have a favorite poet you could add to this thread. Thanks for tuning in. q1

[quasimodo1]

Aphorisms Regarding Impatience
by Ellen Hinsey

1.
Mythologies of the End

Each century believing itself poised as if on the

edge of time.




2.
The Meaning of Impatience

Restlessness in time. To imagine that which is not

swiftly accomplished will never be fulfilled.


3.
Displaced Envy

Unable to initiate creation, or manage civilization:

the drive to engineer decreation with perfection.


4.
Perplexing Instincts

The division of the spirit between advancement and

abandon.


5.
The Attraction of the Apocalypse

To control with absolute certainty one thing. And

for it to be the last.


6.
Fragile Vector

The intersection where civilization and

perseverance meet.


{excerpt from the online poetry magazine, Agni}

[quasimodo1]

-The Whole False History of Human Beings-
There are gorgeous castles in France awkward and ponderous
To live in now, tho the owners who did live
In them were all famous and as modern as possible
Then, which meant fireplaces and a square hole in many walls
To lift food up to them or slide poop down, two different holes
On different sides of the cold damp rooms.
Ditto in England. In Ireland there were bigger castles, beautiful monsters,
And what we now think of as Germans wanted them.
These so-called Germans, actually Merovingians, lived in quonset
Huts of straw, branches, and, oh, a little adobe.
They were more warlike than the Nazis and nearly as
Foolish. Boiled dead on the Irish walls their first trip.
(They had many little boats to get there.)
(Numerous survivors of boiling were allowed to return to Merovingia to tell the tale
As a warning.) The tale got the German collective psychic blood boiling
And “naturally” they went back and this time the Irish,
Who were better cleverer viciouser fighters if you can imagine,
Chopped up all but a few, cleverly chopped up
The trunks of bodies besides the obvious appendages and nuts
And dicks, and only a few survivors were allowed
To return to Merovingia to tell the tale. The
Irish made them cast off from Ireland in their little boats
With bags of arms, heads, and the aforementioned creative carvings Of pieces of trunks together with bags of German or Merovingian genitals
But the Germans or Merovingians threw these in the deep sea
While returning to Germany where more collective blood boiled
And they were hysterically stirred up and vowed to do
Things I hesitate to mention here. So, right, they went back
And the Irish ate them all. ... {excerpt, from the Boston Review}

[quasimodo1]

Outsider Art
by Kay Ryan


Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said—
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

NOTES FROM THE AIR

Selected Later Poems.

By John Ashbery.

364 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95. -- Review entitled "But I Digress" written by Langdon Hammer, nytimes Sunday book review, 4/20/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/books/review/Hammer-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin#

[JBI]

Heart's Needle
by W. D. Snodgrass

For Cynthia

When Suibhe would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, "Your father is dead." "I'm sorry to hear it," he said. "Your mother is dead," said the lad. "All pity for me has gone out of the world." "Your sister, too, is dead." "The mild sun rests on every ditch," he said; "a sister loves even though not loved." "Suibhne, your daughter is dead." "And an only daughter is the needle of the heart." "And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you 'Daddy' he is dead." "Aye," said Suibhne, "that's the drop that brings a man to the ground."
He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.

—after The Middle-Irish Romance
The Madness of Suibhne

1

Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn

By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will,

All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep

In their smooth covering, white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,

continued here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15302

[quasimodo1]

Good to see you on this thread, JBI. Havn't thought about W.D.Snodgrass in years. Thanks for the link.q1

[quasimodo1]

Just Walking Around by John Ashbery


.....Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other. {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Repulsive Theory



Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth, ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

John Colburn
BURNING UP

for Frank Stanford and for Nicaragua

Dawn came and there was something like a great

ear

behind the sun.

Ashes drifted down though nothing had burned.

I wanted to shine like a fish.

Supposedly there are people who

will not burn in a fire.

Biblical people.

I carried my bucket.

Dead men pumped water from

the center of the earth.

We all drank it.

More ashes arrived.

We caught them on our tongues,

angels of next time receiving the body.

The earth tumbled then,

the pump handle creaked.

When soldiers came, we ran.

Like always.

I did a snake dance into the culvert.

Soldiers were afraid of ghosts.

A tongue is like a fish worn dull,

shine gone.

Day after day pieces of wood

floated down the river.

What were they building down there, at the end?

They were building a cross.

They were building a bird to fly us out.

They were building a new city

for the dead to lead from

and the soldiers were blind to it.

By noon the ghosts were gone.

The pump handle creaked, but no water.

When the soldiers came back I changed.

I became an angel of next time.

I said the words and

scales fell from my fish tongue

but the giant ear was stone.

Soldiers drifted like ashes.

I told them:

Downriver, they are building

wings that will not burn in a fire

and you are right to hide.

Put down your guns.
-------------------------------------------------------{excerpt}

http://www.jubilat.org/n8/colburn.html

[quasimodo1]

Turtle
by Kay Ryan


..... Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things. {excerpt}

[JBI]

from LONELINESS by Lee Ann Roripaugh

My father made me keep
the bright orange Sanka cans,
with holes in the lids
for ventilation, on
the back porch overnight.
But by morning, sunlight
had steeped my frogs
like tea bags, their bodies
hot to touch as I laid
them out under
the Nanking Cherry trees
and tried to revive them
with cold water
from the garden hose.
When my father took
them away to bury,
my mother asked me not
to cry. That night
was the Fourth of July,
and my mother and father
and I went up to the attic
to watch the fireworks,
each with a plate-sized
circle of watermelon.
continued here: http://www.usd.edu/engl/faculty/roripaugh.cfm

She seems stylistically traditional, but her foundation in the traditions and experiences of Japanese immigrants in America makes her a very interesting, and insightful poet.

[quasimodo1]

COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS

By Aram Saroyan.

277 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse. Paper, $20.
Review entitled "Lighght Verse" by Richard Hell-----This book collects nearly all the poems Aram Saroyan wrote in the 1960s, when he was in his early 20s and, as he put it, “the only person available at a typewriter who didn’t have some predetermined use in mind for it.” The resulting pages, tapped in Aram Saroyan by his typewriter, were succinct. Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since. {Thanks to JBI for introducing Lee Ann Roripaugh, at least to this reader}





277 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse. Paper, $20.
"Granted — as Saroyan has — he was smoking a lot of grass at the time. But every second person in the United States was, and is, on something or other often enough. The grass factor is interesting because: 1) it’s typical of the era, always an interesting dimension of art; 2) one realizes it couldn’t be an unfair advantage, since no one else wrote like he did; and 3) the reader’s knowledge of it confers a nice extra little psychedelic ting to the pages." {April 27, 2008 nytimes book review section} http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/books/review/Hell-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin#

[quasimodo1]

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/events.html

[quasimodo1]

In a Bottle


... (That lyre should be

Administered a serum! Every last lackluster mist,
Each lactose-lacking mother, can be fixed! No fear!) From human
City rooms a mush of doctorable suburb issues forth–degrees

In marrow-clog, amounts in mottlement. Kreme de la
Kreme! (Officially OK for all of us to be superlative, I’m pretty
Sure, as long as the kids take all their tele-tablets

And the wellness store takes spelling
From the FCC. It’s thanks to lawyers
We have settlements at all, of course,

And thanks to governors your class in governmentalese–it is
Required–and wired!–let’s give our nation’s CEO a great
Big hand! A chip for every memory loss and shoulder! No need

Ever to recollect, or be alone, or die. The message is
The middleman!) But now, beneath exclamatory notice
(although not the one duck’s jaundiced eye) three bugs in a bottle–

Their brains unwashed, their feelers fine–begin (with
Morseless expertise) to conjugate,
And multiply.----------------------------------------- http://www.drunkenboat.com/db3/mchugh/bottle.html

[quasimodo1]

Birthday

for John



.....It is the porous border of summer,
mirage of trees, clouds
floating like years over the mountains.
He has traveled far in his heart
to come to this full quiet
to witness weather stepping
across the lake toward him
like an ordinary saint bringing the news:
another whole day, loved. {second stanza}


http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/29/zimmerman.html

[quasimodo1]

Editor's Note




Dear Friends of The Cortland Review,

We were already several weeks behind our publication schedule when many of you wrote to express your concern. You gave us at The Cortland Review a sense of community that motivated our volunteers to push forward, and just as we were putting the finishing touches on the issue, two planes flew into the nearby World Trade Center and stopped the world. Suddenly our issue, weeks overdue, was utterly insignificant.

Like all of you, we were caught up in confusion and uncertainty. Then many of you wrote to us again, this time inquiring about and praying for our safety. Our feeling of community grew stronger, and you helped us bring structure back to our lives. The Cortland Review is a labor of love, and we thank you for your overwhelming support, for showing us that we are a meaningful part of your lives.

Now it is time for us to show that you are a meaningful part of ours. Our hearts and prayers are with the families and friends of those who are still missing or have been lost in this terrible tragedy, and the rest of you who, like us, are still stunned by it. In a nation strengthened by unity and getting back to business, we hope you find comfort and healing in the poetry among our pages.

Thank you.

God Bless America.

Guy Shahar
Editor-in-Chief

[quasimodo1]

Tenderness and Rot
by Kay Ryan


Tenderness and rot
share a border.
And rot is an
aggressive neighbor
whose iridescence
keeps creeping over.


No lessons
can be drawn
from this however. ... {excerpt} -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=30582

[quasimodo1]

Living in Curved Space
Susan Terris



She inhales stars until she is light-filled
and can bat-wing above the dark earth. ...

...Another out-of-body sequence and
her flanks fur, throat chuffs, tail grows

Below the high dam, the real Abu-Simbil lies.
Below the sea, the lighthouse of Pharos.

There are worlds, too--under lava, under ice--
where no tree falls and no sound is heard.

What is hidden will not again be visible. She
seeks refuge in these places: angles of repose

where salmon turn to seagulls and a hand
may, to infinity, hold a pen and draw itself.


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Caps

.....The storybook boy attempts the simple gesture
of baring his head for his emperor,
but another hat has appeared.
This happens over and over.
Who does not share his despair of simplicity,
of acting clearly and with dignity?
And what pleasure can we find in the caps,
brightly feathered and infinitely various,
that pile up so high they bury us?



-- Kay Ryan {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Rae Armantrout
Results

1



Click here to vote

on who's ripe

for a makeover



or takeover

in this series pilot



Votes are registered

at the server

and sent back



as results.






2



Click here to transform



oxidation

into digestion.



From this point on,

it's a lattice

of ends



disguised as means:



the strangler fig,



the anteater.



3



I've developed the ability

to revise

what I'm waiting for



so that letter

becomes dinner

gradually



while the contrapuntal

nodding

of the Chinese elm leaves



redistributes

ennui

{parts 1 to 3 of this poem: from Jubilat}

[quasimodo1]

I threw my arms about those shoulders...
Darling, you think it's love, it's just a midnight journey.
Best are the dales and rivers removed by force,
as from the next compartment throttles "Oh, stop it, Bernie,"
yet the rhythm of those paroxysms is exactly yours.
Hook to the meat! Brush to the red-brick dentures,
alias cigars, smokeless like a driven nail!
Here the works are fewer than monkey wrenches,
and the phones are whining, dwarfed by to-no-avail.
Bark, then, with joy at Clancy, Fitzgibbon, Miller.
Dogs and block letters care how misfortune spells. ...{excerpt} title=first line

[quasimodo1]

Galatea Encore
As though the mercury's under its tongue, it won't
talk. As though with the mercury in its sphincter,
immobile, by a leaf-coated pond
a statue stands white like a blight of winter.
After such snow, there is nothing indeed: the ins
and outs of centuries, pestered heather.
That's what coming full circle means -
when your countenance starts to resemble weather,
when Pygmalion's vanished. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

TINY WARRIOR

.....You never saw me
Your eyes were closed so tight
They say you put up quite a fight
Somehow your life was over before it had begun and
Gently did I touch and kiss your tiny-fingered hand
Born too soon
You never saw the silver moon
Or the light of a summer's day
Last night I dreamt a gathering of eagles
Had come
To spirit you away
Born too soon
Your tender heart
Could not beat
To the pulsing rhythm
Of life's taut drum

Nikolai 1982-1983 {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A SUMMER OF HUMMINGBIRDS

Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of

Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe,

and Martin Johnson Heade.

By Christopher Benfey. (author of review)

Illustrated. 287 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/books/review/

Miller-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin---

-------------------------------------------------------

On Gossamer Wings



By LAURA MILLER
Published: May 4, 2008

[quasimodo1]

WILD NIGHTS!

Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson,

Twain, James, and Hemingway.

By Joyce Carol Oates.

238 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $24.95. ------

first chapter...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/books/chapters/first-chapter-wild-nights.html?ref=review

s/first-chapter-wild-nights.html?ref=review

---------The Dying of the Light (review title)
The John F. Kennedy Library
Ernest Hemingway and his wife, Mary, on safari in

1953.
By BRENDA WINEAPPLE
Published: April 20, 2008

[quasimodo1]

ONE YEAR
When I got to his marker, I sat on it,
like sitting on the edge of someone's bed
and I rubbed the smooth, speckled granite.
I took some tears from my jaw and neck
and started to wash a corner of his stone.
Then a black and amber ant
ran out onto the granite, and off it,
and another ant hauled a dead
ant onto the stone, leaving it, and not coming back.
Ants ran down into the grooves of his name
and dates, down into the oval track of the
first name's O, middle name's O,
the short O of his last name,
and down into the hyphen between
his birth and death--little trough of his life. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/03/arts/03shinder.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin# -- Jason Shinder, 52, Poet and the founder of the Y.M.C.A.'s National Writer's Voice program.

[quasimodo1]

Inevitably the science community and global warming have created some poetry (what else is there to do while you wait for the fireball). In a science blog of the nytimes, you can look at a digital photo of the interior of a rock and come up with your own poem. This one by Andrew C. Revkin is posted on "dotearth" -- "Perhaps we tamed fire. Perhaps fire tamed us. Certainly we are still seduced by that glowing dance of a thousand roseate veils, whether in the shimmering heat of the hearth or the growl of the V-8.
While water soothes and nourishes, fire empowers. The astonishing magic of controlled combustion, facilitated by Earth’s just-right atmosphere and ample stores of fuels, has allowed humans to transform from scattered gatherers into a gathering global force.
Fire transports us, and in return we transport fire. Together, for better and worse, we have made the world our own." http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/02/poetry-and-air-imagery-and-earth/

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/books/review/Pollitt-t.html?8bu&emc=bua2 New review/essay on Charles Simic from the NYTimes...dated today.

[JBI]

Welcome Back Quasimodo1, good trip?

[quasimodo1]

hey JBI, outstanding trip. Just sort of getting back into the groove. Let me check out what's up with the Poetry Book Club thread.

[quasimodo1]

For A Coming Extinction


Gray whale
Now that we are sinding you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing

I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day

The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours


{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Physics

When you get down to it, Earth
has our own great ranges
of feeling-Rocky, Smoky, Blue-
and a heart that can melt stones.

The still pools fill with sky,
as if aloof, and we have eyes
for all of this-and more, for Earth's
reminding moon. We too are ruled

by such attractions-spun and swaddled,
rocked and lent a light. We run
our clocks on wheels, our trains
on time. {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

WHAT HE THOUGHT


We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. "What does mean this 'flat drink?' someone asked.
What is "cheap date?" (Nothing we said lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we


could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past. ... {excerpt} [ for more information on Heather McHugh-- http://www.unitedstatesartists.org/Public/USAFellows2006/USAFellows2006/HeatherMcHugh/index.cfm ]

[quasimodo1]

I’m an unreliable witness
I zone out


Hail, storm and tempest
you’re marooned
in our marriage


again—


Have wizards knotted
snarls in our nerves,
nooses in our dreams?


Daughter born
in the land of granite
and cod’s head,
we can’t help where we live


A Nor’easter


again—

{from the collection Squandermania and the poem

"Marooned"} link:

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.3/belieu.php

[quasimodo1]

Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun



A book is a suicide postponed.


--Cioran



Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.

Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.

The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.

I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.

As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

STROKE
The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn

the buried meaning in the grave: here
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of its tense
the slow seconds and quick centuries
of sex. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

The Miracle of the Actual



While the poet was falling in love with people she hadn't met

certain Vietnamese were in their third generation of the torment of Agent Orange

which crafts real people like Picassos, joints in all directions, limbs ending.

Lingers at least fifty years like heartbreak, and breaks the mighty imagination

over angles like the Atlantic shatters clams on the jetties up and down New Jersey.



We kept expecting as a society for time to stop and let us into the air conditioning

to ponder and take our ease upon the new-aged recliners of the seventies.

Beholding the fine view, we would devise the humane, unbend some crooks.

It seemed like things were improving when reporters took a break writing about them,

we cannot believe in the population of China and think the scientists extremists.



The lovers Shirin and Khosro fell in love just hearing about each other

so long ago you could claim it never happened, or was a myth

and crossed Anatolia missing each other six or seven times, once,

Khosro saw her bathing and the sight of her back was enough to ruin him

for two or three more crossings until she finally arrived and lost her beauty

for him but not to him at the hand of some angry nephew. .....................{excerpt, from the Adirondack Review}

[quasimodo1]

BY THE DEAD


PRIDE that sat on the beautiful brow,
Scorn that lay in the arching lips,
Will of the oak-grain, where are ye now?
I may dare to touch her finger-tips!
Deep, flaming eyes, ye are shallow enough;
The steadiest fire burns out at last.
Throw back the shutters, -- the sky is rough,
And the winds are high, -- but the night is past.

Mother, I speak with the voice of a man;
Death is between us, -- I stoop no more;
And yet so dim is each new-born plan,
I am feebler than ever I was before, --
{Anonymous . Selected Poems from The Atlantic

Monthly} ------------------------------------------- http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/AnoAtla.html



.....A small database of anonymous poems

[quasimodo1]

SONG FOR A MOUNTAIN-CLIMBER
Pure indifference
moves otherwise. It’s unconditional:
a little fling cannot diminish it:
impartially it flies from everything,

from man’s investments, and
his dearth. The thought that God
might care for us is
terrifying: ought

to keep us hooked on earth. ... {EXCERPT}

[quasimodo1]

- new poetry by August Kleinzahler - title of the review above




By STEPHEN BURT
Published: May 25, 2008

[quasimodo1]

- new poetry by August Kleinzahler - title of the review above




By STEPHEN BURT
Published: May 25, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/25/books/review/Burt2-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[quasimodo1]

For The Twentieth Century


Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand
technologies of ecstasy

boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water
rises without boundaries,

I push the PLAY button:—

...Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti

you are alive again,—

the slow movement of K.218
once again no longer

bland, merely pretty, nearly
banal, as it is

in all but Szigeti's hands

*
Therefore you and I and Mozart
must thank the Twentieth Century, for

it made you pattern ... {excerpt}

F. Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bolingen Prize for poetry

[quasimodo1]

Poetry May 2007 Atlantic Monthly


by Wyatt Prunty

1950

"Then let him ride in the bed of the truck
and wave the world home." That was the old man's answer.
So I made my small-fist climb up back
Of the cab, to see things in reverse and hear
The wind generalizing hedgerows and oaks,
And watch the avenues of fields that broke
Whenever a hedge gave out and sudden farm
Emerged, dogs barking alarm—
As we kept up that way,
Under the shade that tunneled and played
And deepened the road. But where were we going?
I never remember; only,
I owned cattle and barn, the loosely planked bridges
That rattled like drums, limbs flicking the sky,
And gravel busy under the musical tires;
Till filled with what ticked by, I wanted the entire
List of it, ... {excerpt} -- http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200705/prunty-poem

[quasimodo1]

We Lived in a Hug, Shivering with Cold
Tomaz Salamun
Issue 184, Spring 2008



..... On handcarts
(wheelbarrows) there are

blue baby
bags. An unguaranteed
growth ring is left

on the asphalt.
The gadget with which
you fatten

your ears,
rubbed out from sky
lights. The other

will understand all of this
when he takes the time.
The Danube will open its graves.

—Translated from Slovenian
by Brian Henry and the author



{excerpt from the Paris Review}

[quasimodo1]

Jazz Fan Looks Back
by Jayne Cortez


I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium
Jazz at the Philharmonic

I cut my hair into a permanent tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues
& Blakey drummed militant messages in
soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

MIND

The slow overture of rain,
each drop breaking
without breaking into
the next, describes
the unrelenting, syncopated
mind. Not unlike
the hummingbirds
imagining their wings
to be their heart, and swallows
believing the horizon
to be a line they lift
and drop. What is it
they cast for? The poplars,
advancing or retreating,
lose their stature
equally, and yet stand firm,
making arrangements
in order to become
imaginary. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

FLOATING BRIDGES
Oh what a crush of People
Invisible, reborn
Make their way to into this garden
For their eternal rest

Every step we take on earth
Brings us to a new world
Every foot supported
On a floating bridge

I know there is no straight road
No straight road in this world
Only a giant labyrinth
Of intersecting crossroads

And steadily our feet
Keep walking and creating
Like enormous fans
These roads in embryo {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

SUITE FOR RED RIVER GORGE



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------



I. Whistling Arch
(Arch in Formation)

In high winds air rushing through the low opening whines, giving the arch its name. This whine is something that happens very rarely.
—Kentucky’s Land of the Arches: The Red River Gorge

Here geologic time tumbles
from the sandstone face in great slabs
of rock, progress marked
on some same clock keeping pace
with glaciers, the passing of comets,
volcano formation.

The stone’s lonely O frames
mountaintop, dark gorge,
catches a patch of white sky
in its aperture. It shows
where time was, and now passed

sings its only hymn to a congregation
of centipede and snake, blackbird
perched on an ancient laurel,
trillium unfurled,
its pale ear pressed to the stars. {Part I of three from Lynnell Edwards poem}

[quasimodo1]

SLEEPING IN BLUE
I lean into you,
we bury down
in the dunes

the breeze holds
like a whisper
you stroke my brown knees

your fingers
are my unspoken thoughts

the silence is sensuous,
suffuses like
scent of sandalwood ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (A Story for Children)

Issue 184, Spring 2008



1.
If I look to the opposite shore and greet myself there,
if I call out to myself come here
and watch myself laboriously construct from shore-things
a boat, and watch myself over the waters come rowing,
but, crossing the midpoint between shores,
out in the middle of the colorless lake,
no longer approaching, no longer coming closer,
disappear, where am I now, has my boat capsized?

2.
Infinite capacity for love in the smallest detail;
infinite suffering in the innermost reality;
large mind in even the dumbest, mutest object;
destiny in an object that stands still;
heart in the middle of the gray, motionless water;
the largest sadness in the world in a groaning buoy;
in a buoy and the bird overhead, huge sadness,
and yet I hop from place to place as though I’m weightless.

3.
When I picture my father I see the surface of the moon,
plains of moon-stuff chalk-dust papers shredded
by a paper shredder, snowbanks of shredded paper,
nobody to organize it all, no way to “moralize the day
out of its aimlessness,” nobody with a Shop-Vac handy
slowly to turn the whiteness into pattern and form,
revealing, as a chisel reveals in the marble,
a figure, a woman’s figure, an expression of bliss—

4.
now that that big nonentity the moon is in my mind
the clichés for representing Earth are hereby banished—
a hundred open-ended poems, abrupt transitions, high tones
grating against the low, unsorted experience;
sex beside the holy man defiled by sex,
the pig pile of ways you can get high, right there
beside the dawn and how you badly want to kill yourself,
the fleer, the road that unravels like a banner before him—

5.
and the child’s attention fixed upon the animal book,
and all the animals in the book intent upon dinner
or eyeing some harbinger cloud forever, permanently
dejected because some little stone turned their child
to stone, weeping big mule or owl tears as though
the child never turned the page, the sun never shone
again bringing larkspurs, gentian, and the mule-boy
reunited with mule mommy and daddy just in time to end,

6.
but the mule on page four will always be sad, the owl
overhead will always mourn for the mule in his sadness,
nobody will ever bring news of page eighteen when mule-boy
returns from the dead, and the child reading the book
will always preside like a sinister god over these animals,
always dipping in and out of their moods like a snacker,
a little sadness to tide you over until suppertime,
a little elegiac owl, some time at the grief picnic . . . ...


{excerpt...from the Paris Review}

[quasimodo1]

Poems of Depth

--for Gerardo Deniz, based on his "20,000 Places Under Our Mothers," based on Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea

1.

O Ned your name is Land and it’s not anywhere near you;
you’re free in your captivity, holy paradox!
You tire of walking around the submarine,
of looking out at the luminous waters,
brimming with the phosphorescent zoophytes, tiny noctilucae, starfish and aurelias
you know not how to classify.
You’re bored with the sea breeze and the occasional horizon.
O harpooner, how did you land where the only bread is a replacement,
breadfruit?
What creatures are you shooting in your mind?
How you manage to stop the hand, and instead reach for the diving suit.

2.

The crew members hush when the captain’s right hand comes in.
Nemo knows he’s no one;
he enforces, forces.

Is he a double, or an appendage?
The closest of them all.
And if the captain were left-handed?
He says "Less paradigmatic,"
more so, more so.

Underwater’s reign is verticality.
Conseil hears the master’s cry and immediately asks
"Has it bitten you, Monsieur?"

"I’d pay with a limb to own the treasure I just found."
The cannibals throw stones; destroy it.
Destroy the left-handed shell, growing awkward against the clock.

Aronnax takes this lightheartedly; water being less dense,
certainly. He’ll plunge. Nemo hears no news about the incident.

{excerpt)

[quasimodo1]

My Carmelite Family


It had taken me more than an hour
To come to life, under the rose-encrusted
Influence of the star-driven morning.

A blue a bit too pastel, with all its accessories,
A colour he could not have given us
In a hundred years, familiar but shallow,

Intense but guarded, multipled the sensations
Of his different flesh, though not
My ability to return the increased gaze.

Breathtakingly tactile, his beautiful
Carnal mask distanced the white reserve
Of the paper, yet brought it closer

To his cornerstones, the perfect control
Of his hands' immense fresco about to move. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"Ships in the night"
Half-past midnight, hours to go till five.
Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Fair Isle, Bailey
echo confirmation I'm alive.


Half-ignored at two and seven daily
shipping forecasts beat the bounds of light,
track the channels where the moon shines palely:


Humber, Biscay, Fisher, German Bight -
haunts of kittiwake and golden plover -
sound the deepest reaches of my night.


While I'm tossing, turning, thrashing over,
strung out taut with sleepless eyes shut fast,
Plymouth, Portland, Dogger, Wight and Dover


sing me senseless, lashed to nightmare's mast. ...

{excerpt} -- http://www.interpretershouse.org.uk/

[quasimodo1]

THE GAZING EYE FALLS THROUGH THE WORLD

—for Ono No Komachi, 834-880 A. D.

Philadelphia, almost dawn. The Delaware stares
Back like lilies. In their ten thousand sets of eyes

A hawk's claw moon again, hung barely,

And there goes a train clearing snow
For someone beautiful. And while she isn't sure

Why, she's dreaming of moving again
While a Japanese poem whisks by in shapes the snow makes:

As certain as color
Passes from the petal,
Irrevocable as flesh,
The gazing eye falls through the world.

The heart does break.

Ono No Komachi did not beg for her beauty back
On the streets of Kyoto, and the boys running
Past her did not throw carp at her feet,

Nor did they force her to see her age anymore
Than she already had, for she was fire, only

Smarter. Yet, I exist, is the line she hides.

Her eyes, hazel if the sun glanced her face
As she turned away from the street and toward the sea,

Would tell it another way, distilling, as they had for years,
The Sea of Japan until it was a shawl draped across her back,

Its wind carrying the scent of a snuffed candle, until
She was a little snow drifting onto white paper

Containing no lines . . .

~

A stack of white paper, in fact, packed
In a box and taken cross-country.

Even if this story weren't true, I'd still tell it.

{excerpt} ---- blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry.htm

[quasimodo1]

Selection from "City Terrace Field Manual" ..... "What's a little riot between friends? So I stabbed you with a screwdriver between pauses in the ammunition going off, popping of metal canisters burning and exploding? How could I be expected to know if the gunshots in your house were mine? This is life in the big city, free market of desire: you'll thank me in the end. Sure, you may need a little radiation therapy for a fiber-optic plug in your brain. Sure, your kids whine for technicolor mercy in some crystal cathedral a lifetime after toking up as they choked. There's nothing wrong with that--nothing wrong with every Chino-Facility-for-Men Day. Besides, footprints on your face give you a wise look, creases beside your mouth distinguished as headlines. I acknowledge your deepest feelings for me, or the most shallow, what sludge! I don't hold it against you that I had to throw you to the ground, kick you repeatedly. So you broke a few bones? My clothes are clean, no bother. Hey, no diminished affection for your loss of skin. I will not light your children on fire with a molotov cocktail today. I appreciate your concern. My best to you and yours. No one is home to take your call." ..... {excerpt from one prose poem}

[quasimodo1]

"Counting the Dead"


a review
By JOEL BROUWER
Published: June 22, 2008
RISING, FALLING, HOVERING

By C. D. Wright.

97 pp. Copper Canyon Press. $22.
{latest collection by an unpredictable poet} http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/books/review/Brouwer-t.html?8bu&emc=bua2

[quasimodo1]

iNCARNATION

When the Holy One stepped from endless order
into the chaos of our days, it was winter.
Weather blew everywhere. Time itself was dying.
The squirrel, with a tail soft as breath,
curled inside the maple trunk.

The cold stayed. Five-fingered leaves pressed the ground,
their stems perpendicular, thin wrists above each flame-tipped palm.
Cataclysm scanned the days; like any future, like our own. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Purgatorio, Canto XXIX

Singing the way a lady sings in love,
she continued, after saying the last word,
"Blessèd are they whose sins are covered,"

and like the nymphs who once wandered alone
through the shadows of the forest, one
longing to see, one avoiding the sun

then she went, against the flow of the river,
walking along the bank, and I went with her,
following her small steps with my own small steps.

We had not taken a hundred steps between us
when the banks turned to the right as one,
so that I was facing the east again.

And we had not gone far in that direction
when the lady turned around toward me
saying, "My brother, look and listen."

And all at once there was a shining
that raced through the great forest on all sides
making me wonder whether it was lightning,

but whereas lightning is gone as swiftly
as it comes, this stayed, shining brighter and brighter,
and in my mind I was saying, "What can this be?"

And running through the luminous air was
a sweet melody, so that a good zeal
led me to blame Eve for her recklessness,

that there, where the earth and heaven obeyed,
a woman, alone, and who had just been made,
could not bear to be veiled by anything.

If she had only stayed devoutly under
her own, I could have tasted these pleasures
beyond words earlier, and for longer.

While I walked on among so many
first-fruits of eternal happiness,
enraptured, and longing for still greater joys,

before us, the air under the green boughs
came to be like a fire blazing
and we could hear that the sweet sound was singing.

Oh, most holy virgins, if I have endured
fasting, cold, and vigils for you ever,
need drives me now to ask for the reward.

Now is the time for Helicon to brim over
and Urania to help me with her choir
to put into verse things hard to hold in thought.

A little farther, seven golden trees
appeared as an illusion the long space
gave rise to, that was still between us,

but when I had come so near to them that
the common object which deceives the sense
lost none of its features because of distance,

the faculty that nourishes the discourse
of reason saw that they were candlesticks
and heard "Hosanna" in the singing voices.

Above us flamed the beautiful panoply,
far brighter than the moon in the clear sky
at midnight in the middle of the month.

Full of wonder, I turned around toward
the good Virgil, and he answered
with a look as amazed as my own.

Then I turned my face to the high things again
moving so slowly in our direction
that newly wed brides would have overtaken them.

The lady scolded me: "Why are you so
intent on the living lights that you pay no
attention to what there is behind them?"

Then I saw people coming after them
as after their leaders; they were dressed in white
and here there was never whiteness like that.

The water held my image on my left
and like a mirror showed me my own left
in a reflection, when I looked at it.

When I was at a point along the bank
where my distance from them was only
the river’s width, I stood still, the better to see,

and I saw the flames moving ahead, leaving
the air painted behind them, and they
looked the way pennons do, streaming

so that overhead was striped with seven
bands, in all the colors which the sun
makes his bow from, and Delia her girdle.

Those standards went back farther than I
could see, and to my mind there seemed to be
ten paces between the outer ones.

Under a sky as beautiful as I
have said came four and twenty elders, and they
walked two by two, wearing crowns of lilies.

All of them were singing, "Blessèd are you
among the daughters of Adam, and to
all eternity may your beauty be blessed."

After the flowers and other tender growth
opposite to me on the other shore
were without those elect people once more,

in the way star succeeds star in heaven
four animals came following them, each one
wearing green leaves made into a crown.

Each one of them was winged with six wings,
the feathers full of eyes, and Argo’s eyes,
if they were living, would be like those.

I will not waste more rhymes describing their
forms, reader, for I am pressed by another
demand that does not leave me scope for this,

but read Ezekiel who portrays them as
he saw them, out of the cold places
coming with wind and cloud and fire,

and as in his pages you will find them
so were they here, all except for the wings,
where John is with me and departs from him. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

HOMER'S SEEING-EYE DOG
Most of the time he worked, a sort of sleep
with a purpose, so far as I could tell.
How he got from the dark of sleep
to the dark of waking up I'll never know;
the lax sprawl sleep allowed him
began to set from the edges in,
like a custard, and then he was awake,
me too, of course, wriggling my ears
while he unlocked his bladder and stream
of dopey wake-up jokes. The one
about the wine-dark pee I hated instantly.
I stood at the ready, like a god
in an epic, but there was never much
to do. Oh now and then I'd make a sure
intervention, save a life, whatever.
But my exploits don't interest you
and of his life all I can say is that
when he'd poured out his work
the best of it was gone and then he died.
He was a great man and I loved him.
Not a whimper about his sex life --
how I detest your prurience --
but here's a farewell literary tip:
I myself am the model for Penelope.
Don't snicker, you hairless moron,
I know so well what faithful means
there's not even a word for it in Dog,
I just embody it. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

"The Kefti come no more.
They bear us no more the oils
and the cedars for coffins.
Their sails are lost." This was their epitaph
along with the recorded black sky
and the ashfall.
Then Egypt forgot the gracious isle
of the olives
and the palaces of the seven kings
where athletes somersaulted
over the spread horns of bulls.
They died in one night, the pillars of the palace

buckling,
great stones cast down, the galleys
beached on the shore, ruin and ashes
assailing men from the sky.
Thera, the burst throat of the world, coughing fire

and brimstone
there to the north, its voice like the
bellowing of a loosed god
long propitiated to no purpose.
We have known it in our own lives--
the fear of the moving atoms, but
these people
endured the actual megaton explosion, and their
remnants
faded from history, while the timeless, practical
Egyptians
regretted a small loss of trade.
Civilizations die as men die, by
accident then. ... {excerpt from Knossos} *Kefti = Cretans

[quasimodo1]

Logan-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua1&oref=slogin

--Urban Poet {a review by}



By WILLIAM LOGAN
Published: June 29, 2008 -- SELECTED POEMS

By Frank O’Hara.

Edited by Mark Ford.

265 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30. -- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/books/review/Logan-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua1&oref=slogin

[quasimodo1]

From the Elephants' Graveyard


Seeking its own level,
the circus elephant's memory
seeps from the mound
that was its body, cooling
in a borrowed barn in Georgia.

Days of rain, days of no water.
Rumbling pleasure, misery, slow healing.
Smells. Routines. The beloved others.
One man's face, tipped into her weak eyes
over and over for years.

An unseen rivulet,
thick as tar distilled
from a forest's record of rings,
it slips through the straw
and the tired farmyard clay,

through compacted layers of marl and schist,
crystal ribs of lizards
and limestone caverns nursing echoes,
and it joins the oily stream
from the elephants' graveyard-- ... {excerpt, from cavewall press}

[quasimodo1]

.....Although I knew the way music can fill a room,
even with loneliness, which is of course a kind
of company. I could swelter through an August

afternoon -- torpor rising from the river -- and listen
to Stan Getz and J. J. Johnson braid variations
on "My Funny Valentine" and feel there in the room

with me the force and weight of what I couldn't
say. What's an emotion anyhow?
Lassitude and sweat lay all about me

like a stubble field, it was so hot and listless,
but I was quick and furtive as a fox
who has his thirty-miles-a-day metabolism

to burn off as ordinary business.
I had about me, after all, the bare eloquence
of the becalmed, the plain speech of the leafless

tree. I had the cunning of my body and a few
bars -- they were enough -- of music. Looking back,
it almost seems as though I could remember --

but this can't be; how could I bear it? --
the future toward which I'd clatter
with that boy tied like a bell around my throat,

a brave man and a coward both,
to break and break my metronomic heart
and just enough to learn to love the blues. {excerpt from "the blues"}

[quasimodo1]

A DISTANCE OF A SHOUT

We lived on the medieval coast
south of warrior kingdoms
during the ancient age of the winds
as they drove all things before them.

Monks from the north came
down our streams floating that was
the year no one ate river fish.

There was no book of the fores,
no book of the sea, but these
are the places people died. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Prayer



Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Anodyne

I love how it swells
into a temple where it is
held prisoner, where the god
of blame resides. I love
slopes & peaks, the secret
paths that make me selfish.
I love my crooked feet
shaped by vanity & work
shoes made to outlast
belief. The hardness
coupling milk it can't
fashion. I love the lips,
salt & honeycomb on the tongue.
The hair holding off rain
& snow. The white moons
on my fingernails. I love
how everything begs
blood into song & prayer
inside an egg. A ghost
hums through my bones
like Pan's midnight flute
shaping internal laws
beside a troubled river. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

from COMPAÑERA
(Ana Mendieta)
Compañera
We should have bolted you down like
a piece of iron sculpture and
pointed you in another direction
but you were busy looking for love
in the wrong dictionary
looking for a sweet papa
in the wrong encyclopedia

& now I say to myself
Ana is dead
not alive
not returning
what would she think of that

She arrived in the Apple
to jog around the park
have lunch with friends
create sculpture
install exhibitions
& get intellectual stimulation..... ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

{excerpts from long "list" poem}
Entry Forbidden



[Selections from the International Mail Manual,

"Country Conditions for Mailing," May 2005, U.S.

Postal Service]

Albania
Extravagant clothes and other articles contrary to

Albanians' taste.
Items sent by political emigres.

Algeria
Funeral urns.
Saccharine.

Azerbaijan
Cutting and stabbing arms, knuckledusters, stiletto

blades, balls of paralyzing fluid.
Antlers, and the horns of the species Cervidae .

Bahamas
Radioactive materials.
Skimmed milk in tins.

Bangladesh
Quinine, colored pink.

Belarus
Metallized yarn made with or made of gold thread.
Opium.

Botswana
Honey and preparations of honey including royal

jelly, preserves sweetened with honey, and flypaper.
Prison-made goods.

-------------------------------------------------------

Lesotho
Eau de cologne.
Military uniforms.
Printed matter relating to football pools.

Liechtenstein
Mini-spies (miniature wireless transmitters).

Luxembourg
Postcards embellished with fabrics, embroidery,

spangles, except in sealed envelopes.

Malawi
Aphrodisiacs.
Correspondence concerning fortune telling.

Malaysia
Harpoons.

Maldives
Gunpowder.
Weapons of war.
Intoxicants.
Poisons.
Nitrates.
Pork.
Statues used for worship.
Pornographic material.

Pakistan
Arms, ammunition except when sent on behalf of

the government.

Panama
Pastries.

Paraguay
Tomato juices.
Socks except those made of jersey.

Peru
Underwear.
Communist propaganda.
Contraceptive products.
Dolls.
Waxes and creams for shoes.

San Marino
Albums of any kind (of photographs, postcards,

postage stamps, etc.).
-------------------------------------------------------

Vatican City
Human remains.
Live animals.

Vietnam
Invisible ink, codes, ciphers, symbols or other types

of secret correspondence, and shorthand notes.
Used mosquito nets.
{from the publication, Jubilat}

[quasimodo1]

THE POEM CAT
Sometimes the poem
doesn't want to come;
it hides from the poet
like a playful cat
who has run
under the house
& lurks among slugs,
roots, spiders' eyes,
ledge so long out of the sun
that it is dank
with the breath of the Troll King.

Sometimes the poem
darts away
like a coy lover
who is afraid of being possessed,
of feeling too much,
of losing his essential
loneliness-which he calls
freedom.

Sometimes the poem
can't requite
the poet's passion.

The poem is a dance
between poet & poem,
but sometimes the poem
just won't dance
and lurks on the sidelines
tapping its feet-
iambs, trochees-
out of step with the music
of your mariachi band.

If the poem won't come,
I say: sneak up on it. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Few Words on the Soul

(translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh)

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

IN TEMPORE SENECTUTIS
When I am old
I will not have you look apart
From me, into the cold,
Friend of my heart,
Nor be sad in your remembrance
Of the careless, mad-heart semblance
That the wind hath blown away
When I am old.

When I am old
And the white hot wonder-fire
Unto the world seem cold,
My soul's desire
Know you then that all life's shower,
The rain of the years, that hour
Shall make blow for us one flower,
Including all, when we are old. {first two stanzas of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

.....I have loved my God as a child at heart
That seeketh deep bosoms for rest,
I have loved my God as a maid to man—
But lo, this thing is best:

To love your God as a gallant foe that plays behind the veil;
To meet your God as the night winds meet beyond Arcturus' pale.

I have played with God for a woman,
I have staked with my God for truth,
I have lost to my God as a man, clear-eyed—
His dice be not of ruth.

For I am made as a naked blade,
But hear ye this thing in sooth:

Who loseth to God as man to man
Shall win at the turn of the game.
I have drawn my blade where the lightnings meet
But the ending is the same:
Who loseth to God as the sword blades lose
Shall win at the end of the game.

For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil.
Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail. -- {excerpt from "Ballad for Gloom"}

[quasimodo1]

Poetry April 2008 Atlantic Monthly




The Day I Saw the Emperor’s Clay Soldiers

The day I saw the emperor’s clay soldiers
I thought I understood the end of things—
blank faces staring back from 2,000 years.
A farmer found them; I found the farmer
in my father, grandfather, lost since
the Depression days of hominy pots.

My lost fathers are clay now too,
contained, kept from me by a wine-velvet
rope sagging between brass stanchions.
If I reach across, will the alarm sound,
lights flash, uniformed guards push me back?
I thought I understood the end of things.

The day I saw the emperor’s clay soldiers
I wanted to be the electrician who
installs lights above the exhibits.
I know my father’s best side, or knew,
though it makes me dizzy to remember.
I’ve never understood the end of things.

We’re hollow men too, my fathers and I.
We never talked, even when we had
the chance—maybe afraid of the echo.
But 2,000 years is a long time
to wait, even for still, curt clay soldiers
who surely understand the end of things. ... {excerpt, from the Atlantic}

[quasimodo1]

A POETRY READING AT WEST POINT
I read to the entire plebe class,
in two batches. Twice the hall filled
with bodies dressed alike, each toting
a copy of my book. What would my
shrink say, if I had one, about
such a dream, if it were a dream?

Question and answer time.
"Sir," a cadet yelled from the balcony,
and gave his name and rank, and then,
closing his parentheses, yelled
"Sir" again. "Why do your poems give
me a headache when I try

to understand them?" he asked. "Do
you want that?" I have a gift for
gentle jokes to defuse tension,
but this was not the time to use it.
"I try to write as well as I can
what it feels like to be human," ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

EXCERPT FROM "RABBIT MAN"
3.


you saw death like the black legs of your mother

like the bent teeth of your retarded sister

like the wet smell of light in a fish's eye.

you saw death riding without a car or credit cards.

you saw death creeping waddling like the fat women

you hated.

you saw Jesus could not save you.


god's hand is creased with the smell of burnt hair and

hot grease,

she hears you tell your sons don't get no

black nappy-head woman.

her titties sag down sad snakes that crawl up your legs

till your penis talks and with blind sight you see

the two daughters you left in the desert without water.

oh death knows you and invites you for dinner,

rolls out the driveway like a coupe de ville,

is a snake-tongued daughter who turns on you,

is a thirsty rabbit choking on a lonely road.

death is an ax in an elevator rising to the sun.

death is god's egg.

death is a daughter who eats.

you are the table now the wet black earth lays upon--

you are dinner for dirt,

a cadillac spinning back to a one-room shack.

you are the rabbit released from fear,

the circle broken by sun

the handle of a buried ax,

head rolling thru the desert

like tumbleweed--

back to Neptune

[quasimodo1]

Cyprus, I'm coming to you


You reach out your strong arms
Drawing me to you.
I long to bury myself in the fresh green
Folds of your skirt;
Smell your earthy musk about me,
Filling the air, filling me totally with you,
Soothing the hurt and healing me;
Your red-brown body soaking up my tears,
The whisper of your voice telling me that
I belong and am loved;
That I will leave you stronger.
Cyprus – I’m coming to you,
I’m coming to cry large salt tears into your oceans,
To allow you to envelop me with your darkness
And reassure me that she has not
Completely destroyed me.
I’m coming to sit with you and tell you everything.
I know you will understand.
You’ll soothe my aching soul
As I bare it to you; ... {excerpt}



[28 February 1990] -- http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record.asp?id-12340

[quasimodo1]

Weathers

It’s freezing in the desert but there’s nothing there to freeze.
The ground slides & swells. Where have you been buried?

Under which dune did you say? In the morning winter leaves.
Hush I can hear the aphids aphony & almost a word in the wind.

Time. Shovels. I’m late. I’m latent. I lost my list.
It was only "difference." Hailstone a lodestone on a leather lace.

Is there a certain lack of polarity? Is it family? Here I am.
In the cold moon’s blast zone on clean sand & up is the deep murk.

Up licks my foreign shores. Tide of light. Hailstone beckoning
me to the brown ground. Something there, deep in the drift.

It’s a piece of snow. Where have you been buried oasis,
O trace H2O? Hush already I can see evening leaving.

Atop this cactus the bees are hibernating. Hush they are dreaming
their communal dream, nothing. Sweet dreams. A storm took you here.

Your hive of snakeskins & spiny things. Sweet dreams bees.
Every morning winter ferments. Agent my eyes. May the bulb

of winter be planted deep enough not to burn may the blossom
return may the pollen swell & slide may the nectar mollify

*

There once was a hole in a stone.
Try as we might we could not see
to the other side. I put my
hand in the equator. It was
wet & quite warm. I placed my toe,
my leg, in the glazed equator.
My clothes listed from a brassy
hook in the wooden tie upright
in a stone. The air much cooler
now than the equator. My hips
slipped into the flat line of the
equator. You basking under
your tiara of succulents
on a stone, toying with a stone.
My red beard spread on the skin of
the equator. I drank of the
equator. The salt in that line.
I lowered my brain into the
planar equator. You began
to slide & swell above my sure
face, calcified, the equator.
I love you I hummed I can’t swim

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

My friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a ****head or a snake

They will try to exploit you
absorb you confine you
disconnect you isolate you
or kill you

And you will disappear into your own rage
into your own insanity
into your own poverty
into a word a phrase a slogan a cartoon
and then ashes

The ruling class will tell you that
there is no ruling class
as they organize their liberal supporters into
white supremist lynch mobs
organize their children into
ku klux klan gangs
organize their police into killer cops
organize their propaganda into
a devise to ossify us with angel dust
pre-occupy us with western symbols in
african hair styles
innoculate us with hate
institutionalize us with ignorance
hypnotize us with a monotonous sound designed
to make us evade reality and stomp our lives away
And we are programmed to self destruct
to fragment
to get buried under covert intelligence operations of
unintelligent committees impulsed toward death
And there it is

The enemies polishing their penises between
oil wells at the pentagon
the bulldozers leaping into demolition dances
the old folks dying of starvation
the informers wearing out shoes looking for crumbs
the lifeblood of the earth almost dead in
the greedy mouth of imperialism
And my friend
they don’t care
if you’re an individualist
a leftist a rightist
a ****head or a snake ...

{excerpt from poem, "There It Is", also recorded in a jazz album of the same name...1982)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theparisreview.com/viewinterview.php/prmMID/3944 --

Return to Interview Archive Index


ARCHIBALD MACLEISH The Art of Poetry No. 18

Issue 58, Summer 1974
View a manuscript page
Download a PDF of the full interview

[quasimodo1]

WALT MCDONALD~





ADVICE I WISH I'D BEEN TOLD



-------------------------------------------------------

-------------------------


Over the years, I've heard good advice from others;

I wish they had told me sooner. Probably they did,

but I didn't listen. What I'm about to say is what I

constantly urge myself to do. I offer these

comments to save us time, to help us strip off some

ankle weights of language. The difference between

second place and first place in the high jump,

between the silver and the gold, is only about an

inch. Ah, but "How glorious that inch / And that

split-second longer in the air before the fall"

(Robert Francis, "Excellence").


1. Resist Abstractions, and They Will Flee from You

General and abstract statements are easy to say,

and usually flat. They don't show; they tell.

Imagine friends stepping out into the hall and

seeing something vivid and specific, then coming

back into your room and summarizing all the

specific, sensuous details they saw in abstract,

general statements — like any of these: "He was a

distinguished-looking man." "She looked angry."

"She treated others with justice." "He had a strange

way of fixing his hair." "He gave her costly gifts."

"She reacted in a negative way."
I understand these claims — but I don't see or

feel them as richly as I wish I could. The power of

language is in vivid specifics that make us see — or

hear, and feel, through sensuous images. A plot

summary is not as vivid or powerful as seeing the

movie. In order to make any of those statements

quoted above, the writers might have seen specific

details, but — instead of sharing them with readers

— they have "ab-stracted" (drawn conclusions from,

or taken from) their impressions and given us only

the abstract notions of the experience —

"distinguished-looking," "justice," "a negative way."
These are the kind of easy abstractions I'm likely

to make in first drafts — when I'm simply trying to

find a few lines for a poem. But go beyond first

thoughts. I urge you to reach, to work hard; don't

sit down like a couch potato, comfortable with the

easy abstractions of your mind's first draft. A poem

works best, for me, when the writer doesn't tell, but

when he or she invents combinations of specific

words to show us old facts in new ways. Poems

with too many abstractions and not enough images

tell about something, but don't move me as much

as they could.
Abstractions and generalizations are like chunks

of lead tossed on a pond of water — " the art of

sinking in poetry." Abstractions are hired assassins;

they're paid to hold you hostage, to keep you

bound to your couch, in house arrest. They don't

want you to travel, to see the vivid images of other

regions; they hope you won't discover what you're

missing. Now let's stop and admit some obvious

facts about the craft of writing:
1) There are no rules. All I can do is describe

what works for me in the best poems I read. All I

can do is share the best advice I can to help you

write better poems; all I can promise is to focus on

what I admire.

--

http://wwwstage.valpo.edu/english/vpr/mcdonaldes

say.html

[quasimodo1]

Jayne Cortez -- States of Motion -----------------

Sun Ra left the planet traveling in a pyramid made

of metal keys Willie Mae Thornton sailed away in

an extra large moisture-proof harmonica Pauline

Johnson flew off to the meeting in her brass

trimmed telephone Thelonious Monk withdrew

seated in a space ship shaped like a piano Art

Blakey departed in a great wood & stainless steel

bass drum Esther Phillips bowed out in a nasal

sounding chrome microphone Charles Tyler,

George Adams & Clifford Jordan reached another

realm riding in receptacles constructed like

saxaphones Okot p'Bitek shoved off in an attache

case full of songs, books & whiskey Leon Damas

hit the road in a big black banjo Andre Lorde

departed while wrapped in her book jackets Dizzy

Gillespie zoomed off in a sweet chariot shaped like

a trumpet Miles Davis left in a magnificent

copper mute Marietta Damas vacated the terrain

in one beautiful house filled with folkloric &

electronic gadgets Romare Bearden crossed over

the rainbow in a blimp made of his collages &

etchings Norman Lewis pushed away from the

shore in a vault shaped like a bicycle ....{excerpt

from this poem by Jayne Cortez, poet and jazz

songwriter}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/07/04/world/20080704POD_index.html

[quasimodo1]

Review/Music; Setting Agitprop Poetry To the Beat of Current Jazz

By JON PARELES
Published: March 25, 1991 "On Wednesday and Thursday nights, S.O.B.'s presented agitprop poets with a beat, politically committed performers whose music saves them from didacticism. Jayne Cortez's poetry, which praises 'revolutionary commitment' and warns of environmental and social catastrophe, has attracted some of the best musicians in contemporary jazz; Macka B., a British reggae toaster (rapper) and singer, performed with Robotiks, a lean four-piece band, as the Mad Professor mixed the sound and added the electronic effects of dub reggae." - ------"Ms. Cortez is a poet, not a rapper, chanting and reciting in a determined voice that sometimes rises in a girlish lilt. She has hooked her poetry to Ornette Coleman's kind of funk -- a bristling, prismatic, harmonically unconstrained surge of riffs and propulsion." http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE4DA153EF936A15750C0A9679582 60&scp=4&sq=Jayne+Cortez&st=nyt

[quasimodo1]

".....Winter
wears her well-earned warrior’s clothes,
a season wearing thinner, wetter,
colder, but still and ever green, here—
she’d not leave her leaves, not shed
what’s hers though the southerly
tried and tries to whistle them away.
And since this is my comedy
of ears, in one and in the other’s
fate’s to trip again, I’ll claim:
the body is both bread and breed,
as words well said are planted seed
and grow so where we tread is treed,
where each line read remains the reed
on which the note is played when pressed
to lips, mouth, self-ordained as priest,
weds wed to we’d and weed and so
with word grown one forever as even
the dead remain in deed, wound round
and round in these wet sheets of wind." {excerpt from Dreaming in New Zealand}

[quasimodo1]

STANDARDIZATION
When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age,
The journalist with his marketable woes
Fills up once more the inevitable page
Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose;

Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop
With horror at the house not made with hands
And when from vacuum cleaners and tinned soup
Another pure theosophist demands

Rebirth in other, less industrial stars
Where huge towns thrust up in synthetic stone
And films and sleek miraculous motor cars
And celluloid and rubber are unknown;

When from his vegetable Sunday School
Emerges with the neatly maudlin phrase
Still one more Nature poet, to rant or drool
About the "Standardization of the Race";

I see, stooping among her orchard trees,
The old, sound Earth, gathering her windfalls in,
Broad in the hams and stiffening at the knees,
Pause and I see her grave malicious grin.

For there is no manufacturer competes
With her in the mass production of shapes and things.
Over and over she gathers and repeats
The cast of a face, a million butterfly wings. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Morningside Heights, July



Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off? A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil. I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells **** in Farsi.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0208/poem_181087.html








Louise Glück’s most recent collection of poems,

Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), was a 2006

National Book Award finalist. She lives in

Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches at Yale.


Midsummer
by Louise Glück


On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear

off  the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new

bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding

the water.


The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool

and wet,
marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never

saw,
buildings in cities far away.


On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the

rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was

what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began

to pair off
but always there were a few left at the

end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each

other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No

one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night

their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.


At the beginning and at the end, though, we were

all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children

were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we

knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the

end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all

that kissing.


And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as

being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking

cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.


And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the

front steps in the morning,
eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor

to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out

in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the

mountain was built.


And then the day faded. We were dreaming,

waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the

shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining

about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.


Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be

meeting later.
And you thought of  walking into the woods and

lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the

water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the

person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Self-Analysis

The poet is a forger who forges so completely that he forges even the

feeling he truly feels as pain. And




those who read his poems feel absolutely, not his two separate pains,

but only the pain that they do not feel.




And thus, diverting the understanding, the wind-up train we call the

heart runs along its track.

Fernando Pessoa



http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/books/15abroad-letters.html

[firefangled]

There are two line indents that Lit-Net can't produce, L4 and L12

Prayer


Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl
themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the
way to create current, making of their unison (turning, re-
infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison) making of themselves a
visual current, one that cannot freight or sway by
minutest fractions the water's downdrafts and upswirls, the
dockside cycles of finally-arriving boat-wakes, there where
they hit deeper resistance, water that seems to burst into
itself (it has those layers) a real current though mostly
invisible sending into the visible (minnows) arrowing
motion that forces change--
this is freedom. This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. ...{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/18/arts/Poet-Laureate.php Finally a great modern poet gets some recognition.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/17/books/17poet-extra.html?pagewanted=all -- Some samples of her work, nyt web extra.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/books/review/Orr-t.html?ref=review

[quasimodo1]

Outsider Art
by Kay Ryan


Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said—
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people. ... {exceprt}

[firefangled]

What a great thread, Quasi. There are so many wonderful contemporary poets out there, it is difficult to come in contact with them all independently.


The Lord and the General Din of the World


The kids are shrieking at the edge of the pool,
their angelic faces twisting. They like
to shriek—they like to make the Great Dane bellow.
When he cannot stand it any longer, he jumps
the wall and chases them, still screaming, in.

And under all this now a steady grating—
A plastic bottle of blue cheese dressing
Scraping up against the concrete gutter,
Bobbing off the aqua, sun-flicked waves
The kids have made by jumping.

And there’s a man here from Afghanistan
who hasn’t cut his greasy hair since he was driven mad.
His name is Simon. He looks just like The Christ.
Walks up and down beside the pool, oblivious
To screams and barking. He gestures as he talks,
Whispers and pontificates. No one is listening.

Lord, is the general din of the world your own?
Something that is good in me is crumbling… {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

To the Memory



of J.S. Bach because on bad nights
I take my three brown dogs to bed
with a box of crackers, which we share
while I sing them their favorite song:

Sheep may safely graze on pasture
when their shepherd guards them well.
Sheep may safely graze on pasture…

I have lived by how this is funny.
I address myself to the dead now.

My body thinks she is the moon—the moon
as remembered against the metal bars
of a bridge whose arc we trust
the more the less we can.

From a distance the cars move to music.
From a distance the world sings back.

My body thinks she is the moon
but she is a clown and I
am all music and unbearably
weighted down. ... {excerpt}


© Jane Mead

[quasimodo1]

IMMANENCE



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Antibellum Plantation, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia



We leave the one-room schoolhouse
with the double meaning of its woodenness
spelled out in ranks of hair-shirt oaken
benches and plank-top desks without a blemish
of utility. No inkwells, no pencil minders to give
them purpose. It is a place of the truly elementary—
of bone-tired inertia and of rote, and educative homilies
about the patriot saints. On the slatted wall
above the teacher's desk, the Father of His Country
still presides from the unfinished portrait
by Gilbert Stuart. Disembodied head, dead white
on a black ground of rusty satin. It speaks to dark eternity,
bright virtue: the mythic cherry tree; the bitter winter
of faithfulness, Philadelphia locked up like an English gaol;
the patience to stick till the screw turned tight
at Yorktown. Did the hardness or the homilies prepare
those boys of 1850 for Sunday strolls to come,
ranked like Continentals, into the rifle's obliterating jaws?

My wife has four-leaf clover on her mind.
I've never seen one, and she abhors the vacuum
of my skepticism. She prays that God will let us find
this unicorn of flora, and as we walk the well-groomed lawn,
she plucks one up, a tiny Intercession. Yet there's another:
I stoop, incredulous, and here it is, the four plump lobes
like the fingers of a cartoon hand. I laugh the sinner's
incongruous guffaw, while she thanks God, He
who helps our unbelief. I think how I want to be with her
when lightning X-rays open spaces, or the car knifes
across four lanes of highway, the shattering median,
the onrushing flail of steel. Then I recall those war-
dead Southern boys, bent to their hard-assed catechism,
their Calvinist Lives of the Saints—
three hundred thousand war-dead boys. ... {excerpt}

[from the Valparaiso Poetry Review]

[quasimodo1]

IN THE VILLAGE OF MY ANCESTORS


.....Unknown old men and women
Appropriate the names
Of young men and women from my memory

I ask one of them
Tell me for God's sake
Is George the Wolf still living

That's me he answers
With a voice from the next world

I touch his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes
To tell me if I'm living too {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

CIVILIZATION
Send your army home to their wives and children.
It is late. Your soldiers are burdened, thirsty.
Lock the doors, the windows, and here in darkness
lie down beside me.

Speak of anything we possess in common:
ground or law or sense. Only speak it softly.
Spiders crawl the crevices. Violent voices
ruin their balance,

and they’ll fall – intuit – upon our faces,
where I fear them most. But you’ve heard this terror,
and my midnight phobias always move you –
cause to remain here. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

In High Waters



Quartered, cleaned, this beautiful black wire looped

and
knotted
through the skin, the squash hung on the porch.
All September they puckered, cracked. Then they

were dry.
They clicked a little when the wind

made its way past them: hollow sounds, almost

pleasing—
cupped hands
clapping a bit for themselves when we weren't

looking.
November I drew them.
They had stopped changing.

I drew them landlocked. Canyons.
They scorned the rivers that had abandoned them.
Four phases of some moon, I drew them. Four

rowboats run
aground.
Four, leashed to their piling, nudging each other

from time to time. Four sails
learning to quarter wind, gather way—what

cunning, what
incredible
patience! We brought them indoors to a large nail
in the kitchen. I drew them again, four ships in a

rice-paper
storm,

four rocks narrowly avoided by the sailor, who,
thanks to them finds his way home.
Four sailors' memories of the same girl. Now
you would cook them. Soaked in water, salt, they

would
plump up.

How nice to have things out of season. Summer

squash
caught in our winter, there is snow outside
like you would not believe.
Whole trees are buried beneath waves, becalmed.

The world

is everywhere able to flow into itself without

damage
or confusion. ... {excerpt}


Copyright © Jorie Graham [from Ploughshares]

[quasimodo1]

A Happy Childhood


Babies do not want to hear about babies; the like to be told of giants and castles.
Dr. Johnson

No one keeps a secret so well as a child
Victor Hugo


My mother stands at the screen door, laughing.
“Out out damn Spot,” she commands our silly dog.
I wonder what this means. I rise into adult air


like a hollyhock, I’m so proud to be loved
like this. The air is tight to my nervous body.
I use new clothes and shoes the way the corn-studded


soil around here uses nitrogen, giddily.
Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. Often I sing
to myself all day like a fieldful of August


insects, just things I whisper, really,
a trance in sneakers. I’m learning
to read from my mother and soon I’ll go to school,


I hate it when anyone dies or leaves and the air
goes slack around my body and I have to hug myself,
a cloud, an imaginary friend, the stream in the road-


side park. I love to be called for dinner.
Spot goes out and I go in and the lights
in the kitchen go on and the dark,


which also has a body like a cloud’s,
leans lightly against the house. Tomorrow
I’ll find the sweatstains it left, little grey smudges. {first part of long poem}

[quasimodo1]

SHE IS IN THE PAST, SHE HAS THIS GRACE

My mother looks at her watch,
As if to look back over the curve
Of her life, her slackening rhythms:
Nobody can know her, how she lost herself
Evening after evening in that after,
Her hourly feelings, the repetition,
Delay and failure of her labour
Of mourning. The steps space themselves
Out, the steps pass, in the mists
And hesitations of the summer,
And within a space which is doubled,
One of us has passed through the other,
Though one must count oneself three,
To figure out which of us
Has let herself be traversed.

Nothing advances, we don’t move,
We don’t address one another,
I haven’t opened my mouth
Except for one remark,
And what remark was that?
A word which appeases the menace
Of time in us, reading as if
I were stripping the words
Of their ever-mortal high meaning.

She is in dark light, or an openness
That leads to a darkness,
Embedded in the wall
Her mono-landscape
Stays facing the sea
And the harbour activity,
Her sea-conscience being ground up
With the smooth time of the deep,
Her mourning silhouetted against
The splendour of the sea
Which is now to your left,
As violent as it is distant
From all aggressive powers
Or any embassies. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Blue Juniata



Farmhouses curl like horns of plenty, hide
scrawny bare shanks against a barn, or crouch
empty in the shadow of a mountain. Here
there is no house at all—


only the bones of a house,
lilacs growing beside them,
roses in clumps between them,
honeysuckle over;
a gap for a door, a chimney
mud-chinked, an immense fireplace,
the skeleton of a pine,


and gandy dancers working on the rails
that run not thirty yards from the once door. ...





...for sometimes a familiar music hammers
like blood against the eardrums, paints a mist
across the eyes, as if the smells of lilacs,
moss roses, and the past became a music
made visible, a monument of air. {excerpts}


Malcolm Cowley, “Blue Juniata” from Blue Juniata: A Life. Copyright © 1985

[quasimodo1]

Meta-A and the A of Absolutes



I write my God in blue.
I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts.
I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight.
I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath,
or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade,
at twilight, on the desert's steps.
Brown by day and black by night,
my God has wings that open to no reason.
He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes,
scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb
of light leaping from a fire.
Press him he bleeds.
When you take your hand to sacred water,
there is no sign of any wound.
And so I call him supreme, great artist,
judge of time, scholar of all living event,
the possible prophet of the possible event.
Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars,
blind men with their scars dulled by kola,
blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop,
blind men in corn, blind men in steel,
reason by their lights that our tongues
are free, our tongues will redeem us.
Speech is the fact, and the fact is true.
What is moves, and what is moving is.
We cling to these contradictions.
We know we will become our contradictions,
our complex body's own desire.
Yet speech is not the limit of our vision.
The ear entices itself with any sound.
The skin will caress whatever tone
or temperament that rises or descends.
The bones will set themselves to a dance.
The blood will argue with a bird in flight.
The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice,
brush and thrill to an old bone.
And yet there is no sign to arrest us
from the possible.
We remain at rest there, in transit
from our knowing to our knowledge.
So I would set a limit where I meet my logic.
I would clamber from my own cave
into the curve of sign, an alphabet
of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. ... {excerpt}




[Jay Wright, “Meta-A and the A of Absolutes” from

Transfigurations: Collected Poems (Baton Rouge:

Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Copyright ©

2000 by Jay Wright]

[quasimodo1]

Song



I make the drive, walk the corporate walk,
To do what I must and give what I got.
I turn the chrome knob and I fill my slot.
I talk and I joke, a regular guy
I input and output and rarely ask why.


It's pasta and wine at home in my flat.
It's voice mail and e-mail, then feed the stray cat.
Sometimes I go out and chat up the girls.
Some want to tango, some manage a smile.
Some come home and have safe sex for a while.


My sweet IRA, my 401-k,
Let me buy tickets to games, to a play—
I go with the gang and don't get involved.
I fly to St. Croix and stare at the sea.
I travel first class. No day-tripper me. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

‘Be Music, Night’



Be music, night,
That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs


Be a hand, sea,
That her dreams may watch
Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world


Be a voice, sky,
That her beauties may be counted
And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
Into the mirror of her loveliness


Be a road, earth,
That her walking may take thee
Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

".....Restoration
knows no half measure. It will
not stop when the treasured and lost
bronze horse remounts the steps.
Even this horse will founder backward
to coin, cannon, and domestic pots,
which themselves shall bubble and
drain back to green veins in stone.
And every word written shall lift off
letter by letter, the backward text
read ever briefer, ever more antic
in its effort to insist that nothing
shall be lost."
{last part of "All Shall be Restored"}

[quasimodo1]

JERSEY RAIN
Now near the end of the middle stretch of road
What have I learned? Some earthly wiles. An art.
That often I cannot tell good fortune from bad,
That once had seemed so easy to tell apart.

The source of art and woe aslant in wind
Dissolves or nourishes everything it touches.
What roadbank gullies and ruts it doesn't mend
It carves the deeper, boiling tawny in ditches.

It spends itself regardless into the ocean.
It stains and scours and makes things dark or bright:
Sweat of the moon, a shroud of benediction,
The chilly liquefaction of day to night,

The Jersey rain, my rain, soaks all as one:
It smites Metuchen, Rahway, Saddle River,
Fair Haven, Newark, Little Silver, Bayonne.
I feel it churning even in fair weather ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Raft of Grief

The raft that means “a great number” is not related
at all to the raft that carries people or their possessions
in the water. The two words are homonyms.
—Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins

If only there were a boat,
low and long and loaded
with all we’d brought or built:
the fatal inattentions,
anxieties and tics
that time had sanctified,
our good and bad intentions,
rages, lapses, and aches.
If only it were that easy,
to stand only ankle-
deep in the sullied water, ... {excerpt}

[firefangled]

Seven Poems

1

At the edge
of the body’s night
ten moons are rising.

2.

The scar remembers the wound.
The wound remembers the pain.
Once more you are crying.

3.

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

4.

My body lies down
And I hear my own
voice lying next to me.

5.

The rock is pleasure
and it opens
and we enter it
as we enter ourselves
each night.

7.

I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.

{excerpt}

—Mark Strand from Darker

[TheFifthElement]

Seven Poems

1

At the edge
of the body’s night
ten moons are rising.

2.

The scar remembers the wound.
The wound remembers the pain.
Once more you are crying.

3.

When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

4.

My body lies down
And I hear my own
voice lying next to me.

5.

The rock is pleasure
and it opens
and we enter it
as we enter ourselves
each night.

7.

I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.

{excerpt}

—Mark Strand from Darker

Mark Strand is not a poet I know, though after reading this he is a poet I think I should know. These are wonderful, thanks Firefangled.

[Sweets America]

Oh Fire, I agree with Fifth, these poems are just great! I studied one poem by Mark Strand last year, I loved it, it was strange:

Eating poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement steps and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

[PrinceMyshkin]

I wish I were close
To you as the wet skirt of
A salt girl to her body.
I think of you always.



Akahito (trans. K. Rexroth)

[TheFifthElement]

Oh Fire, I agree with Fifth, these poems are just great! I studied one poem by Mark Strand last year, I loved it, it was strange:

Eating poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement steps and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Ah yes! I have read this poem. It is excellent, thanks for posting Sweets :)

[TheFifthElement]

If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.

Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.

Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbour to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You would be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.

I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
- your keen-nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…

When we swam once
I touched you in the water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said

this is how you touch other women
the grass cutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume


and knew


what good it is
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in the act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of a scar...

(extract: The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife, Michael Ondaatje)

[quasimodo1]

Squarings

When you sat, far-eyed and cold, in the basalt throne
Of “the wishing chair” at Giant’s Causeway,
The small of your back made sense of the firmament.

Like a papoose at sap-time strapped to a maple-tree,
You gathered force out of the world-tree’s hardness.
If you stretched your hand forth, things might turn to stone.

But you were only goose-fleshed skin and bone,
The rocks and wonder of the world were only
Lava crystallized, salts of the earth

The wishing chair gave savour to, its kelp
And ozone sharpening your outlook
Beyond the range of possibility.

*

I was four but I turned four hundred maybe
Encountering the ancient dampish feel
Of a clay floor. Maybe four thousand even.

Anyhow, there it was. Milk poured for cats
In a rank puddle-place, splash-darkened mould
Around the terra cotta water-crock

Ground of being. Body’s deep obedience
To all its shifting tenses. A half-door
Opening directly into starlight.

Out of that earth house I inherited
A stack of singular, cold memory-weights
To load me, hand and foot, in the scale of things.

*

Sand-bed, they said. And gravel-bed. Before
I knew river shallows or river pleasures
I knew the ore of longing in those words.

The places I go back to have not failed
But will not last. Waist-deep in cow-parsley
I re-enter the swim, riding or quelling

The very currents memory is composed of,
Everything accumulated ever
As I took squarings from the tops of bridges

Or the banks of self at evening.
Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash.
Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in.

*

Heather and kesh and turf stacks reappear
Summer by summer still, grasshoppers and all,
The same yet rarer: fields of the nearly blessed

Where gaunt ones in their shirt-sleeves stooped and dug
Or stood alone at dusk surveying bog-banks —
Apparitions now, yet active still

And territorial, still sure of their ground,
Still interested, not knowing how far
The country of the shades has been pushed back.

How long the lark has stopped outside these fields
And only seems unstoppable to them
Caught like a far hill in a freak of sunshine.

{first four stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

Top ten poetry collections as represented by Small Press Distributers-- ( www.spdbooks.org )-- 1) “Complete Minimal Poems,” by Aram Saroyan (Ugly Duckling).
2) “Poeta en San Francisco,” by Barbara Jane Reyes (Tinfish).
3) “All That’s Left,” by Jack Hirschman (City Lights).
4) “You Are a Little Bit Happier Than I Am,” by Tao Lin (Action).
5) “The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story,” by Rusty Morrison (Ahsahta).
6) “Lobster With Ol’ Dirty Bastard,” by Michael Cirelli (Hanging Loose).
7) “The Evolution of a Sigh,” by R. Zamora Linmark (Hanging Loose).
8) “Lyric Postmodernisms,” edited by Reginald Shepherd (Counterpath).
9) “Incubation: A Space for Monsters,” by Bhanu Kapil (Leon Works).
10) “Underwater Lengths in a Single Breath,” by Benjamin S. Grossman (Ashland Poetry).

[quasimodo1]

The Parade


How exhilarating it was to march
along the great boulevards
in the sunflash of trumpets
and under all the waving flags—
the flag of ambition, the flag of love.

So many of us streaming along—
all of humanity, really—
moving in perfect step,
yet each lost in the room of a private dream.

How stimulating the scenery of the world,
the rows of roadside trees,
the huge curtain of the sky.

How endless it seemed until we veered
off the broad turnpike
into a pasture of high grass,
headed toward the dizzying cliffs of mortality.
{excerpt}

[firefangled]

Ah! Michael Ondaatje. Wonderful poet and the Cinnamon Peeler is an amazing book. Thanks Fifth for postingt this poem.

[firefangled]

Charles Simic is unusual to say the least. If I have said this before or posted this poem of his forgive me. He is strange and the residing Poet Laureate of the United States. He is Charles Bukowski with attention to details.


Pastoral Harpsichord

…Poor reception, that’s the one
Advantage we have here,
I said to the mutt lying at my feet
And sighing in sympathy.
On another channel the preacher
Came chaperoned by his ghost
When he shut his eyes full of tears
To pray for dollars.

“Bring me another beer,” I said to her ladyship,
And when she wouldn’t oblige,
I went out to make chamber music
Against the sunflowers in the yard. {excerpt}


—Charles Simic, from Walking the Black Cat

[quasimodo1]

THE BORDERS
To say that she came into me,
from another world, is not true.
Nothing comes into the universe
and nothing leaves it.
My mother—I mean my daughter did not
enter me. She began to exist
inside me—she appeared within me.
And my mother did not enter me.
When she lay down, to pray, on me,
she was always ferociously courteous,
fastidious with Puritan fastidiousness,
but the barrier of my skin failed, the barrier of my
body fell, the barrier of my spirit.
She aroused and magnetized my skin, I wanted
ardently to please her, I would say to her
what she wanted to hear, as if I were hers.
I served her willingly, and then
became very much like her, fiercely
out for myself. -- {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Wherein Obscurely


On the road with billowing poplars,
In a country flat and desolate
To the far-off gray horizon, wherein obscurely,
A man and a woman went on foot,

Each carrying a small suitcase.
They were tired and had taken off
Their shoes and were walking on
Their toes, staring straight ahead.

Every time a car passed fast,
As they're wont to on such a stretch of
Road, empty as the crow flies,
How quickly they were gone--

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Making Your Own Eclipse
The word comes from a Greek word
for ‘abandonment’: we catch an untraceable
fire already kindled in another.

When night falls suddenly
for such a short period
in the clearest skies of the day

as a second darkening,
they could not have known
that what they were seeing was the Moon

acting as a screen.
For blue does not mean
its sensation in us, but the power

in it, the behaviour of the aligning
light in the pleasure-journey
of the obedient morning.

Across Ireland the blueness will drop
to temperatures of dusk,
a gentle east wind

will blow birds silent,
and stars along the Path
of Totality will decorate

the late forenoon.
Bleating flocks and fearful herds
will unexpectedly return to their stables

and patterns of light and dark
will tremble over the ground.
We will keep looking

at the fleecy space,
you curled up with your head
on my knee, saying, We

have been cheated, the twenty-
four seconds are passing and it
is much worse than we expected.

Then there will be the subtle
tension as the Moon begins
to creep into your face, .....{half of this poem}

[quasimodo1]

Piute Creek



One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air. ... {excerpt}

[Sweets America]

Piute Creek



One granite ridge
A tree, would be enough
Or even a rock, a small creek,
A bark shred in a pool.
Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted
Tough trees crammed
In thin stone fractures
A huge moon on it all, is too much.
The mind wanders. A million
Summers, night air still and the rocks
Warm. Sky over endless mountains.
All the junk that goes with being human
Drops away, hard rock wavers
Even the heavy present seems to fail
This bubble of a heart.
Words and books
Like a small creek off a high ledge
Gone in the dry air. ... {excerpt}

:thumbs_up Yeaaaaah!! I love how nature is described in this, the greatness and meditative aspect of the rocks still standing there after million summers...

Here's one by Galway Kinnell:

Cemetary Angels

On these cold days
they stand over
our dead, who will
erupt into flower as soon
as memory and human shape
rot out of them, each bent
forward and with wings
partly opened as though
warming itself at a fire.

[firefangled]

Charles Simic is unusual to say the least. If I have said this before or posted this poem of his forgive me. He is strange and the residing Poet Laureate of the United States. He is Charles Bukowski with attention to details.

—Charles Simic, from Walking the Black Cat

Quasi, your PM is correct. The current Poet Laueate is now Kay Ryan.

[firefangled]

I modeled my thesis in oral literature of the Ojibwa after a similar work by Gary Snyder on an analysis of a Northwest American Native story. It was when Turtle Island (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry 1975) was first published and I discovered this poem, which at the time, had the effect of answering many questions that had swam in the pool of my mind for years.

Snyder was known to have often rescued road kill from having an ignoble final days or transition to the life that awaited them. As was customary of more civilized societies than our own, the death of animals was by choice or survival was respected by transforming every possible part of the animal into something that continued to live through its use. This poem involved a gray female fox from which Snyder and his son were removing the pelt...Thus, this excerpt...

One Should Not Talk To a Skilled Hunter About What Is Forbidden By the Buddha
- Hsiang-yen

...
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel
a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

[quasimodo1]

Above Pate Valley


.....—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years. -- {excerpt|

[quasimodo1]

The Bather

Where the path to the lake twists out of sight,
A puff of dust, the kind bare feet make running,
Is what I saw in the dying light,
Night swooping down everywhere else.

A low branch heavy with leaves
Swaying momentarily where the shade
Lay thickest, some late bather
Disrobing right there for a quick dip—

(Or my solitude playing a trick on me?)
Pinned hair coming undone, soon to float
As she turns on her back, letting
The dozy current take her as it wishes

Beyond the last drooping branch
To where the sky opens
Black as the water under her white arms,
In the deepening night, deepening hush,

The treetops like charred paper edges,
Even the insects oddly reclusive..... {excerpt}

[TheFifthElement]

Prism

I.
Who can say what the world is? The world
is in flux, therefore
unreadable, the winds shifting,
the great plates invisibly shifting and changing –

2.
Dirt. Fragments
of blistered rock. On which
the exposed heart constructs
a house, memory: the gardens
manageable, small in scale, the beds
damp at the sea’s edge –

7.
From the pierced clouds, steady lines of silver.

Unlikely
yellow of the witch hazel, veins
of mercury that were paths of the rivers –
Then the rain again, erasing
footprints in the damp earth.

An implied path, like
a map without a crossroads.

9.
A night in summer. Outside,
sounds of a summer storm. Then the sky clearing.
In the window, constellations of summer.

I am in bed. This man and I,
we are suspended in the strange calm
sex often induces. Most sex induces.
Longing, what is that? Desire, what is that?
In the window, constellations of summer.
Once I could name them.

10.
Abstracted
shapes, patterns.
The light of the mind. The cold, exacting
fires of disinterestedness, curiously

blocked by earth, coherent, glittering
in air and water,

the elaborate
signs that said now plant, now harvest –

I could name them, I had names for them:
two different things.

19.
The room was quiet.
That is, the room was quiet, but the lovers were breathing.

In the same way, the night was dark.
It was dark, but the stars shone.

The man in bed was one of several men
to whom I gave my heart. The gift of the self,
that is without limit.
Without limit, though it recurs.

The room was quiet. It was an absolute,
like the black night.

Extract from Prism (Averno)

[quasimodo1]

"Abstracted
shapes, patterns.
The light of the mind. The cold, exacting
fires of disinterestedness, curiously

blocked by earth, coherent, glittering
in air and water," Great posting, TheFifthElement, I'm just now getting to appreciate some of her work.

[quasimodo1]

Work Song



This fastening, unfastening, and heaving—
this is our life. Whose life is it improving?
It topples some. Some others it will toughen.
Work is the safest way to fail, and often
the simplest way to love a son or daughter.
We come. We carp. We're fired. We worry later.


That man is strange. His calipers are shiny.
His hands are black. For lunch he brings baloney,
and, offered coffee, answers, "Thank you, no."
That man, with nothing evil left to do
and two small skills to stir some interest up,
fits in the curtained corner of a shop.


The best part of our life is disappearing
into the john to sneak a smoke, or staring
at screaming non-stop mills, our eyes unfocused,
or standing judging whose sick joke is sickest.
Yet nothing you could do could break our silence.
We are a check. Do not expect a balance.


{3 of 4 stanzas, from Poetry Magazine}

[quasimodo1]

From the Last Canto of Paradiso
by Dante Alighieri

xxxiii, 46-48, 52-66


As I drew nearer to the end of all desire,
I brought my longing's ardor to a final height,
Just as I ought. My vision, becoming pure,


Entered more and more the beam of that high light
That shines on its own truth. From then, my seeing
Became too large for speech, which fails at a sight


Beyond all boundaries, at memory's undoing—
As when the dreamer sees and after the dream
The passion endures, imprinted on his being


Though he can't recall the rest. I am the same:
Inside my heart, ... {excerpt}


Translated from the Italian by Robert Pinsky

[quasimodo1]

To. W. P.



I


Calm was the sea to which your course you kept,
Oh, how much calmer than all southern seas!
Many your nameless mates, whom the keen breeze
Wafted from mothers that of old have wept.
All souls of children taken as they slept
Are your companions, partners of your ease,
And the green souls of all these autumn trees
Are with you through the silent spaces swept.
Your virgin body gave its gentle breath
Untainted to the gods. Why should we grieve,
But that we merit not your holy death?
We shall not loiter long, your friends and I;
Living you made it goodlier to live,
Dead you will make it easier to die.


II


With you a part of me hath passed away;
For in the peopled forest of my mind
A tree made leafless by this wintry wind
Shall never don again its green array.
Chapel and fireside, country road and bay,
Have something of their friendliness resigned;
Another, if I would, I could not find,
And I am grown much older in a day.
But yet I treasure in my memory
Your gift of charity, your mellow ease,
And the dear honour of your amity;
For these once mine, my life is rich with these.
And I scarce know which part may greater be,—
What I keep of you, or you rob of me. ... {2 of 4 stanzas}

[quasimodo1]

.....My former former wife has become a unique poet;
most of my work,
such as it is is done.
Full moon was October second this year,
I ate a mooncake, slept out on the deck
white light beaming through the black boughs of the pine
owl hoots and rattling antlers,
Castor and Pollux rising strong
—it’s good to know that the Pole Star drifts!
that even our present night sky slips away,
not that I’ll see it.
Or maybe I will, much later,
some far time walking the spirit path in the sky,
that long walk of spirits—where you fall right back into the
“narrow painful passageway of the Bardo”
squeeze your little skull
and there you are again


waiting for your ride

{last half of this poem, Waiting for your Ride, by Gary Snyder}

[quasimodo1]

I couldn’t shake the sea noise out of my head,
the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion,
so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick,
name O’Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head;
but this Caribbean so choke with the dead
that when I would melt in emerald water,
whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent,
I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans,
dead-men’s-fingers, and then, the dead men.
I saw that the powdery sand was their bones
ground white from Senegal to San Salvador,
so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month
in the Seamen’s Hostel. Fish broth and sermons.
When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife,
when I saw my worries with that other woman,
I wept under water, salt seeking salt,
for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword
cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! --- {fromThe Schooner 'Flight'
by Derek Walcott }

[quasimodo1]

Goodbye to Tolerance
by Denise Levertov


.....And you, good women, bakers of nicest bread,
blood donors. Your crumbs
choke me, I would not want
a drop of your blood in me, it is pumped
by weak hearts, perfect pulses that never
falter: irresponsive
to nightmare reality.


It is my brothers, my sisters,
whose blood spurts out and stops
forever
because you choose to believe it is not your business.


Goodbye, goodbye,
your poems
shut their little mouths,
your loaves grow moldy,
a gulf has split
the ground between us,
and you won’t wave, you’re looking
another way.
We shan’t meet again—
unless you leap it, leaving
behind you the cherished
worms of your dispassion,
your pallid ironies,
your jovial, murderous,
wry-humored balanced judgment,
leap over, un-
balanced? ... then
how our fanatic tears
would flow and mingle
for joy ... {excerpt}


Denise Levertov, “Goodbye to Tolerance” from Poems 1972-1982. Copyright © 1975 by Denise Levertov.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jun/poets.htm

"Discovering" Young Poets
How some of the best-known poets of this century

got that way

by Peter Davison

[firefangled]

William Stafford is a master. He belongs to that category of artists the Japanese have named national treasure. He offers works of art as well as sharp ideas about the craft. One of the most amazing gifts to poetry is his theme of the golden thread. He believes that whenever you set a detail down in language, it becomes the end of a thread...and every detail—the sound of the lawn mower, the memory of your father's hands, a crack you once heard in the lake ice, the jogger hurtling herself past your window—will lead you to amazing riches.

William Blake said:

I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.

I asked Stafford one day. “Do you believe that every golden thread will lead us through Jerusalem’s wall, or do you love particular threads?” He replied, “No, every thread…only the golden string knows where it is going, and the role for a writer or reader is one of following, not imposing.”

—From the Introduction to William Stafford’s The Darkness Around Us Is Deep by Robert Bly.


If I could Be Wallace Stevens

The octopus would be my model—
It wants to understand; it prowls
The rocks a hundred ways and holds
Its head aloof but not ignoring .
All its fingers value what
They find. “I’d rather know,” they say.
“I’d rather slime along than be heroic.”

My pride would be to find out; I’d
bow to see, play the fool,
ask beg, retreat like a wave—
but somewhere deep I’d hold the pearl,
never tell… {excerpt}

—William Stafford, from The Darkness Around Us Is Deep

[quasimodo1]

A Morris Dance


Across the Common, on a lovely May
day in New England, I see and hear
the Middle Ages drawing near,
bells tinkling, pennants bright and gay—
a parade of Morris dancers.

One plucks a lute. One twirls a cape.
Up close, a lifted pinafore
exposes cellulite, and more.
O why aren't they in better shape,
the middle-aged Morris dancers?

Already it's not hard to guess
their treasurer—her; their president—him;
the Wednesday-night meetings at the gym.
They ought to practice more, or less,
the middle-aged Morris dancers.

Short-winded troubadours and pages,
milkmaids with osteoporosis—
what really makes me so morose is
how they can't admit their ages,
the middle-aged Morris dancers. ...

{excerpt}

-------------------------------------------------------

Interviews July 16, 2008
Mary Jo Salter talks about her new collection,

Phone Call to the Future; editing The Norton

Anthology of Poetry; and her early days as an

assistant poetry editor at The Atlantic.

by Sarah Cohen

-------------------------------------------------------

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807u/mary-jo-salter



The Poet's Poet {interview with Mary Jo Salter}

[Sweets America]

I
One Should Not Talk To a Skilled Hunter About What Is Forbidden By the Buddha
- Hsiang-yen

...
Peeling skin back (Kai
reminded us to chant the Shingyo first)
cold pelt. crinkle; and musky smell
mixed with dead-body odor starting.

Stomach content: a whole ground squirrel well chewed
plus one lizard foot
and somewhere from inside the ground squirrel
a bit of aluminum foil.

The secret.
and the secret hidden deep in that.

Thanks for this, I love it.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0825/p25s01-bogn.html



------------------------

Poet Kay Ryan: A profile
By Elizabeth Lund

"Kay Ryan may be the only American poet who

describes her writing process as "a self-imposed

emergency," the artistic equivalent of finding a

loved one pinned under a 3,000-pound car. These

"emergencies," she says, allow her to tap into

abilities she wouldn't normally have, much like a

father who single-handedly lifts a vehicle off his

child. In Ms. Ryan's case, however, what has

survived because of her efforts over the past three

decades is a singular voice and vision. Her poems -

with their compact size and technical precision,

their wit and sharp intelligence - have been praised

by critics for their ability to do and say things that

none of her contemporaries can match." ----------{excellent article about Kay Ryan and her methods, August 25, 2004}

[quasimodo1]

Gulls
by Jorie Graham


Those neck-pointing out full bodylength and calling
outwards over the breaking waves.
Those standing in waves and letting them come and
go over them.
Those gathering head-down and over some one
thing.
Those still out there where motion is
primarily a pulsing from underneath
and the forward-motion so slight they lay
their stillness on its swelling and falling
and let themselves swell, fall ...
Sometimes the whole flock rising and running just
as the last film of darkness rises
leaving behind, also rising and falling in
tiny upliftings,
almost a mile of white underfeathers, up-turned, white spines
gliding over the wet
sand, in gusts, being blown down towards
the unified inrolling awayness
of white. All things turning white through
breaking. The long red pointing of lowering sun
going down on (but also streaking in towards) whoever
might be standing at the point-of-view place
from which this watching. This watching being risen
from: as glance: along the red
blurring and swaying water-path:
to the singular redness: the glance a
being-everywhere-risen-from: everywhere
cawing, mewing, cries where a
single bird lifts heavily
just at shoreline, rip where
its wing-tips (both) lap
backwash, feet still in
the wave-drag of it, to coast
on top of its own shadow and then down to not
landing. ... {first stanza}

[quasimodo1]

Jazz Fan Looks Back



I crisscrossed with Monk
Wailed with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium
Jazz at the Philharmonic

I cut my hair into a permanent tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tongues
& Blakey drummed militant messages in
soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love seat in my bones.... {excerpt}

[firefangled]

If you read it fast it's almost scat. Certainly jazz. This is cool, Quasi

[quasimodo1]

PUSH BACK THE CATASTROPHES

I don't want a drought to feed on itself
through the tattooed holes in my belly
I don't want a spectacular desert of
charred stems & rabbit hairs
in my throat of accumulated matter
I don t want to burn and cut through the forest
like a greedy mercenary drilling into
sugar cane of the bones

Push back the advancing sands
the polluted sewage
the dust demonsthe dying timber
the upper atmosphere of nitrogen
push back the catastrophes


Enough of the missiles
the submarines
the aircraft carriers
the biological weapons
No more sickness sadness poverty
exploitation destabilization
illiteracy and bombing
Let's move toward peace ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

SOJOURNS IN THE PARALLEL WORLD
We live our lives of human passions,
cruelties, dreams, concepts,
crimes and the exercise of virtue
in and beside a world devoid
of our preoccupations, free
from apprehension--though affected,
certainly, by our actions. A world
parallel to our own though overlapping.
We call it "Nature"; only reluctantly
admitting ourselves to be "Nature" too.
Whenever we lose track of our own obsessions,
our self-concerns, because we drift for a minute,
an hour even, of pure (almost pure)
response to that insouciant life: ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Archangel Cathedral


The coffins of great Russian princesses stand
in the basement of the Moscow Kremlin. They
were brought there in the 30s from the
destroyed Voznesensky Monastery.

There where the angels weave the sky,
where there is the triumph of the last dream,
where the cellar secrets conceal,
I asked myself: For whom

have I lived and suffered this life?
I didn’t fall prostrate in prayer,
I always sang my own words
in the dark storehouse of useless tsaritsas.

Here, under the gigantic splinter-bar of walls
there is disparagement of forgetfulness.
I stand over poisoned Glinskaya,
her pillaged tomb.

And over us now red flags,
now the alcoholic madness of the country.
Only timid bones can be seen
through the robbers’ hole in the sarcophagus.

In these cracks of the royal masonry,
in this mould of terrifying corners,
there are the denouements of chronic illness,
the revelation of prophetic words. ... {excerpt}

[translated by Richard McKane]

[stlukesguild]

I Am Goya

I am Goya
of the bare field, by the enemy's beak gouged
til the craters of my eyes gape
I am grief.

I am tongue
of war, the embers of cities
on the snows of the year 1941
I am hunger.

I am the gullet
of a woman hanged whose body like a bell
tolled over a blank square
I am Goya...

from I Am Goya

tr. Stanley Kunitz


Elegy for My Mother

I canceled your funeral, mother;
you can't be resurrected in this day and age.

Mama, forgive these repeated gatherings.
I know you face has long since turned to snow;
I have taken you from the crematorium
and will place you now beside Father.

This spring we let earth fall
into your graves at the Novodevichi Monastery:
Voznesensky and Voznesenkaya rest there now
and the earth is given new life.

Whatever you touched has become holy:
the benches in the square, and Ordynka Street
behind them, are holy;
over Catherine's birch tree
shines your maternal light.

What did earth offer you, Antonina?
Mad for lilies of the valley,
you were an intellectual in a worker's kerchief
with the backbone of a tragedienne...

Unsung Russia you were,
guarding hearth and home;
a young wife, you combed our troubles, drew them,
with your hair, back into a bun tight as a fist...

Now you'll be a stranger when you waken me at night;
the little Akhmatova volume will fly open on its own:
What is it that torments you, Antonina?
Tonya?...

I have not spoken these words with condescension;
Whoever reads them, please do not wait.
Rush with lilies of the valley to your mother,
for mine I cannot- its too late.

from Elegy for My Mother
tr. William Jay Smith and F.D. Reve

[JoanS]

sorry for question which is not reffered straightly to the thread... some weeks ago i remeber the thread about jim morrison and his poetry, now i can´t find it.. anybody can help me?

[quasimodo1]

THE ANTIWORLDS



1961



.....The Anti-great-academician
has got a blotting paper vision.

Long live creative Antiworlds,
great fantasy amidst daft words!
There are wise men and stupid peasants,
there are no trees without deserts.

There’re Antimen and Antilorries,
Antimachines in woods and forests.
There’s salt of earth, and there’s a fake.
A falcon dies without a snake.

I like my dear critics best.
The greatest of them beats the rest
for on his shoulders there’s no head,
he’s got an Antihead instead.

At night I sleep with windows open
and hear the rings of falling stars,
From up above skyscrapers drop and,
like stalactites, look down on us.

High up above me upside down,
stuck like a fork into the ground,
my nice light-hearted butterfly,
my Antiworld, is getting by.

I wonder if it’s wrong or right
that Antiworlds should date at night.
Why should they sit there side by side
watching TV all through the night?
They do not understand a word.
It’s their last date in this world.
They sit and chat for hours, and
they will regret it in the end!
The two have burning ears and eyes,
resembling purple butterflies...

...A lecturer once said to me:
«An Antiworld? It’s loonacy!»

I’m half asleep, and I would sooner
believe than doubt the man’s word...
My green-eyed kitty, like a tuner,
receives the signals of the world. {excerpt}




Translated by Alec Vagapov

[quasimodo1]

Life at War



The disasters numb within us
caught in the chest, rolling
in the brain like pebbles. The feeling
resembles lumps of raw dough


weighing down a child’s stomach on baking day.
Or Rilke said it, ‘My heart. . .
Could I say of it, it overflows
with bitterness . . . but no, as though


its contents were simply balled into
formless lumps, thus
do I carry it about.’
The same war


continues.
We have breathed the grits of it in, all our lives,
our lungs are pocked with it,
the mucous membrane of our dreams
coated with it, the imagination
filmed over with the gray filth of it:


the knowledge that humankind,


delicate Man, whose flesh
responds to a caress, whose eyes
are flowers that perceive the stars,


whose music excels the music of birds,
whose laughter matches the laughter of dogs,
whose understanding manifests designs
fairer than the spider’s most intricate web,


still turns without surprise, with mere regret
to the scheduled breaking open of breasts whose milk
runs out over the entrails of still-alive babies,
transformation of witnessing eyes to pulp-fragments,
implosion of skinned penises into carcass-gulleys.


We are the humans, men who can make;
whose language imagines mercy,
lovingkindness we have believed one another
mirrored forms of a God we felt as good—


who do these acts, who convince ourselves
it is necessary; these acts are done
to our own flesh; burned human flesh
is smelling in Vietnam as I write. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

A Performance Of Henry V At Stratford-Upon-Avon
Nature teaches us our tongue again
And the swift sentences came pat. I came
Into cool night rescued from rainy dawn.
And I seethed with language - Henry at
Harfleur and Agincourt came apt for war
In Ireland and the Middle East. Here was
The riddling and right tongue, the feeling words
Solid and dutiful. Aspiring hope
Met purpose in "advantages" and "He
That fights with me today shall be my brother."
Say this is patriotic, out of date.
But you are wrong. It never is too late

For nights of stars and feet that move to an
Iambic measure; all who clapped were linked,
The theatre is our treasury and too,
Our study, school-room, house where mercy is

Dispensed with justice. ... {excerpt}

[firefangled]

—from Loose Sugar

visitor fragment

Lately the visitor
looks the same as the enemy; why
should I agree to see her?

She withdraws to the various
outposts I invented earlier…

My visitor is on the other side,
I can’t see her from
the ring of fire I’ve been assigned…

{excerpt}

blue square

When I gave up hope of being complete
the sorrow deepened.
As that went too, a mystery replaced it.

Now it’s a faint blue square against which being
and nonbeing will always
wrestle, even in the afterlife…

{excerpt}

below below

In the corner of the heart
reserved for action, a pig is eating
the poppies of hell;

it doesn’t look up when I come in;
it doesn’t need
a confirming ideal. If there are flowers

there must be dirt below hell
where power has no meaning
but growth comes out of it.

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/books/review/Burt2-t.html?_r=1&8bu&emc=bua2&oref=slogin



--Juan Felipe Herrera Review entitled "Punk Half

Panther' by Stephen Burt 8/10/08 -- NYT book

review ----- "For Juan Felipe Herrera, poetry is all about breaking down barriers."

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/08/books/08book.html?ref=books

Books of The Times
Truth and Beauty? Only in Afterlife, a review by

Charles McGrath




Published: August 7, 2008 ---

POSTHUMOUS KEATS

A Personal Biography

By Stanley Plumly

392 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95.

[quasimodo1]

My word against theirs, my sickle humor
against their last glass of chianti. Simple,
Direct and compassionate—in a way, let us say,
it is in my nature to be generous: to remind
the passengers about the last stop in Anguish-
town, to spell integration with an X, to scrub
the word Prison with sneaky vastness inside.

It is my own penchant for skull symphonies
my embossed headdress, especially, that brings
me to your carpeted doom-time; this flowery intro
serves a purpose; every spirit strand is an exit,
a cash & carry star of exits and entrances. ---



La Muerte

(Death)

by Juan Felipe Herrera

[TheFifthElement]

Cows

Over the shrug of the motorway bridge
they go, their vintage design
stirring vague pangs of grief
in salesmen and long-distance lorry drivers.

As a child I would scramble under the hedge
to consult with cows. I found them enigmatic
with their slow conversation, lathery breath,
eyes like planets. It seemed they had few plans,
gave scant thought to the question of destiny.
But sometimes there might be a calf,
with soft hooves, and a stunned expression -
a dumb prophet, visited by this future:

no dry-straw jostle of the cowshed.....

(excerpt, Cows from the collection Tilt)

[quasimodo1]

http://www.pw.org/content/poetry_brothel_postcard_new_york_city --- Article: THE POETRY BROTHEL: POSTCARD FROM NEW YORK CITY

[quasimodo1]

http://www.pw.org/content/poetry_brothel_postcard_new_york_city THE POETRY BROTHEL: POSTCARD FROM NEW YORK CITY (proper spelling of author...Jean Hartig

[quasimodo1]

Below is a poem by 2008 Jackson Poetry Prize recipient, Tony Hoagland.

IN THE PAINTING THE ALLEGORY OF THE TEMP AGENCY,

the employers are depicted as wolves
with bloodred mouths and yellow greedy eyes,
pursuing the small-business employees through the dark

forest of capitalism. It is night, and
by the light of the minimum-wage moon we can see
the long pink tongues of the bosses hanging out

and the dilated white eyeballs of the employees as they flee
through woods, lacking any sense of
solidarity or collective organizing power.

Upon closer inspection the leaves beneath their feet
are shredded dollar bills which bear
the distressed expressions of ex-presidents

and the wind in the trees is making a long
howl of no health insurance or job security
and No, it is not really a very good painting,

heavy-handed in concept, and unintentionally
comic in a way that
invites us to laugh at the desire for justice –

Rather, the painting shows that the artist was untalented,
and is an allegory of how difficult it is
to be both skillful and sincere ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Writing in the Afterlife



I imagined the atmosphere would be clear,
shot with pristine light,
not this sulphurous haze,
the air ionized as before a thunderstorm.


Many have pictured a river here,
but no one mentioned all the boats,
their benches crowded with naked passengers,
each bent over a writing tablet.


I knew I would not always be a child
with a model train and a model tunnel,
and I knew I would not live forever,
jumping all day through the hoop of myself.


I had heard about the journey to the other side
and the clink of the final coin
in the leather purse of the man holding the oar,
but how could anyone have guessed


that as soon as we arrived
we would be asked to describe this place
and to include as much detail as possible—
not just the water, he insists,


rather the oily, fathomless, rat-happy water,
not simply the shackles, but the rusty,
iron, ankle-shredding shackles—
and that our next assignment would be


to jot down, off the tops of our heads,
our thoughts and feelings about being dead,
not really an assignment,
the man rotating the oar keeps telling us—

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

cruel, cruel summer



either the postagestamp-bright inflorescence of wild mustard
or the drab tassel of prairie smoke, waving its dirty garments


either the low breeze through the cracked window
or houseflies and drawn blinds to spare us the calid sun


one day commands the next to lie down, to scatter: we're done
with allegiance, devotion, the malicious idea of what's eternal


picture the terrain sunk, return of the inland sea, your spectacle
your metaphor, the scope of this twiggy dominion pulled under


crest and crest, wave and cloud, the thunder blast and burst of swells
this is the sum of us: brief sneezeweed, brief yellow blaze put out


so little, your departure, one plunk upon the earth's surface,
one drop to bind the dust, a little mud, a field of mud


the swale gradually submerged, gradually forgotten
and that is all that is to be borne of your empirical trope: ... {excerpt}

[stlukesguild]

oops... double post!

[stlukesguild]

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

On Ovid

I see him there on a night like this but cool, the moon blowing through the black streets. He sups and walks back to his room. The radio is on the floor. Its luminous green dial blares softly. He sits down at the table; people in exile write so many letters. Now Ovid is weeping. Each night about this time he puts on sadness like a garment and goes on writing. In his spare time he is teaching himself the local language (Getic) in order to compose in it an epic poem no one will ever read.

On Parmenides

We pride ourselves on being civilized people. Yet what if the names for things were utterly different? Italy, for example. I have a friend named Andreas, an Italian. He has lived in Argentina as well as England, and also Costa Rica for some time. Everywhere he lives he invites people over for supper. It is a lot of work. Artichoke pasta, Peaches. His deep smile never fades. What if the proper name for Italy turns out to be Brzoy- will Andreas continue to travel the world like the wandering moon with her borrowed light? I fear we failed to understand what he was saying or his reasons. What if every time he said cities, he meant delusion, for example?

Sleep Stones

Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her life in an assylum, wondering why, writing letters to her brother the poet, who had signed the papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember, I am living here with madwomen, days are long. She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones- marble and granite and porphyry- she broke them, then collected the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night...

Canicula Di Anna

1.

What we have here
is the story of a painter.
It occurs in Perugia
(ancient Perusia)
where lived the painter Pietro Vannucci
(c. 1445-1523)
who was called Perugino,
a contemporary of Michelangelo
and teacher of Raphael...

some philosophers of the present day
meet in conclave
upon the ancient rock of Perugia.
They seem to have commissioned
for purposes of public relations,
a painter to record them
in pigments of the fifteenth century...

The painter, at any rate,
is not a happy man.
A woman, as usual, is the problem...

9.

It is perhaps not widely known
that a certain so-called Perugino
spent the years 1483-1486
covering with frescoes
that part of the Sistine Chapel
now immortalized by Michelangelo's Last Judgment,
which efforts were ruthlessly effaced
to make space for
his successor's more colossal genius...

13.

Group portrait: a special commission.
I paint the philosophers at table and
on the way to Being.
The bottle is difficult. I attempt
a color invented by Cimabue.
The phenomenologists engage in dialectic
about wine as vinegar.
To render the throat holes
(blackish red) I have acquired
sap of the tree draco dracaena (an expense
but the phenomenolgists requested it)
or dragon's blood, which, medieval legend
recounts, originally
soaked into the earth
during epic wars
of elephants and dragons...

14.

The phenomenologist from Paris hates mosquitoes
and carries a small electric devise
that lures the female mosquito to her death
by simulating the amorous cry of the male. Then
to block the whining sound, he has pink earplugs.
As he sits in conversation
with the phenomenologist from Sussex
a mosquito is observed to enter.
The Englishman leaps to his feet,
calling, "Let us use the mosquito machine!"
and smashes the insect to the wall
with the devise. It is the first sign
of wide ontological differences
that will open in the Anglo-French dialectic
here.

from Anne Carson- Plainwater

I have only read this single volume of Carson, but already I find myself entranced. Carson is Canadian (have you read any of her JBI?)... 58 years old... a professor of classics and comparative literature with a distinguished background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art. She writes poetry, prose, essay, criticism, and translation (her recent translations of Sappho are well regarded). Beyond this the writer is quite reluctant to reveal information of her personal life.

Carson's books of "poetry" are a fascinating merger of all of her experiences as a scholar and professional writer. Her works remind me in many ways of the writings of Borges, Italo Calvino, Augusto Monterroso, the shorter writings of Kafka, Donald Barthleme, and the "prose poems" of W.S. Merwin. Like these writers she blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction... often presenting marvelous fictive accounts of historic personages complete with scholarly details and notations. At times one is not certain if the work one is reading is prose, poetry, essay, history, critical analysis, meditation... or something completely different. There is also a marvelous crisp, crystalline prose not far removed from that of Borges, Calvino, or Merwin.

[JBI]

I have read shorter poems, and am currently awaiting a volume of Autobiography of Red from the library. She seems to be one of the supreme poets of our age, though she isn't very Canadian in terms of her poetics. She seems more English (mixed with American as most poets are) than Canadian. If you want real Canadian verse, look into John Newlove, the Prairie Poet.

Still though she has her talent, and I am looking forward to The Autobiography of Red, which is supposedly a rich verse novel, though highly neo-classical, as she seems to be.

[Jozanny]

Entrancing post luke. Hate to say this but she's post modern par excellence if she can sustain that tone through an entire collection; put her in my reading notes.

[stlukesguild]

And too think... I was first led to her by a mention of her poetry in a critical essay by Harold Bloom. It seems old Harold is aware that there is literature of merit beyond that of the dead white European males.:D

[Jozanny]

And too think... I was first led to her by a mention of her poetry in a critical essay by Harold Bloom. It seems old Harold is aware that there is literature of merit beyond that of the dead white European males.:D

If I can be pardoned for the aside, a lack of good critical reading has been of great frustration to me. Before I came online, I belonged to The Readers' Subscription, through which I purchased my few critical titles--although I will concede I don't like Wayne Booth and did not really understand Lodge's apologia in his collection of essays on Bakhtin--mainly because I am not familiar with Bakhtin himself.

I do have RS bookmarked, since I found it, at least I hope I did, now under Doubleday's control, but haven't renewed my membership, yet.

I find it difficult, despite wish lists and ease of ordering, to know where to go to find critics and scholars of interest.

[JBI]

And too think... I was first led to her by a mention of her poetry in a critical essay by Harold Bloom. It seems old Harold is aware that there is literature of merit beyond that of the dead white European males.:D

Where did this essay appear? If possible could you provide a JStor link, or something?

[JBI]

If I can be pardoned for the aside, a lack of good critical reading has been of great frustration to me. Before I came online, I belonged to The Readers' Subscription, through which I purchased my few critical titles--although I will concede I don't like Wayne Booth and did not really understand Lodge's apologia in his collection of essays on Bakhtin--mainly because I am not familiar with Bakhtin himself.

I do have RS bookmarked, since I found it, at least I hope I did, now under Doubleday's control, but haven't renewed my membership, yet.

I find it difficult, despite wish lists and ease of ordering, to know where to go to find critics and scholars of interest.

You need to look into major academic publications, and such. If you have no access to a university library, perhaps your local library has JStor access, which gives you an archive of the major periodicals in scholarly research. Really though, nothing beats a major university library, as it is virtually impossible to do any research (of any credibility) without one.

[stlukesguild]

I have little use for most contemporary criticism which far too often seems more concerned with the critic's pet theory (political, social, or otherwise) than with the author's work. On the other hand, I have read a good many examples of literary criticism in the broader sense... not the academic analysis and deconstruction of a single text... some of which ranks as truly great literature in and of itself. Among these examples I would include Samuel Johnson, Walter Pater, William Hazlitt, Samuel Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, etc... I am also attracted to the critical writings of a good many who are poets/authors of some importance in their own right. Here I would include J.L. Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Eugenio Montale, Octavio Paz, W.S. Merwin, Edward Hirsch, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dana Gioia, etc... Of modern/contemporary critics who are not also known for their efforts as poets/novelists/etc... I have already noted I have little use for theory or ideology. Critics I have found of the most use to me have included Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Roger Shattuck, and even the often outrageous Camille Paglia. You might ask JBI or even Petrarch'sLove (if she is back from her trip) who would in all likelihood be far more able to lead you in the right direction concerning contemporary scholarly criticism than I.

[JBI]

You'd be surprised what can be found in contemporary scholarship - Bloom too admits this, as often (though he tries to add as many "classical voices" as possible) his anthologies are loaded with contemporary critics. Either way though, the so called "school of resentment" is an American phenomenon for the most part - modern European, and even Canadian scholarship is far less political.

The reasons are, that America, which really is a pastiche of different cultures, has formed itself into a definite culture, like other nations. Canada has not done so, and has opted for the so called "cultural mosaic" approach, a mixing of traditions and customs from the wide immigrant communities. In truth, the 250,000 immigrants arriving each year (the government is trying to up it to 500,000, but are currently unable to process that many immigrants) add in addition to the old-immigrant community cultures, an additional contemporary culture, which creates even more culture backgrounds amongst Canadians.

For this reason, though we have areas of teaching in English departments (such as African Canadian literature, and Italian Canadian literature) we do not have the sort of racial or feminist focusing as programs in the U.S. have. Canadians, though we weren't perfect, as no one will claim, seemed to have treated, historically, immigrants and minorities far better than our American counterparts, and, as a result, do not have to make as big a deal, as most academics, students, and writers are minorities themselves, and the immigrant-native divide is rather invisible.

That being said, European countries for the most part seem to have defined traditional cultures and literatures, and as a result, do not have the same focuses as the American system. The problem though, is that their scholarship is focused on their linguistic backgrounds, and as a result, is untranslated, and restricted to their literature. Unless you are interested in, and able to read texts in the original, such scholarship will be of no interest.

In truth, though much of American scholarship is placed under the so called "school of resentment", the bulk of it actually seems to follow the sort of "aesthetic" preferred by Bloom. It isn't difficult to find scholarship of interest, if one has the resources available to look (assuming you aren't concerned with ideological or overly theoretical criticism, which, I would say, is not completely devoid of merit, and is often quite beautifully written).

[stlukesguild]

Dammit! JBI! You're making me work here... and I just started back to teaching today! I had to skim through How to Read and Why, Where Shall Wisdom be Found, and a couple other volumes (at least I knew it wasn't in The Western Canon) until I found where I had highlighted it in Genius p. 11:

I have avoided all living geniuses in this book, partly so as to evade the distractions of mere provocation. I can identify for myself certain writers of palpable genius now among us: the Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, the English poet Geoffrey Hill...

This... and another mention or praise for Autobiography of Red... which I cannot find off hand... as well as Edward Hirsch's mention of her in How to Read a Poem was enough to intrigue me. A brief perusal of Plainwater in the bookstore was enough to convince me to give her a try. I was very pleased with what I have read.

[quasimodo1]

Dickinson relied on Higginson as a reporter from the world beyond her garden gate.

WHITE HEAT

The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson

By Brenda Wineapple

Illustrated. 416 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $27.95 (review of this book called "Emily's Tryst" by Miranda Seymour, 8/22/08) http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/24/books/review/Seymour-t.html?_r=1&ref=review&oref=slogin

[quasimodo1]

AN IMPROVISATION FOR ANGULAR MOMENTUM

Walking is like
imagination, a
single step
dissolves the circle
into motion; the eye here
and there rests
on a leaf,
gap, or ledge,
everything flowing
except where
sight touches seen:
stop, though, and
reality snaps back
in, locked hard,
forms sharply
themselves, bushbank,
dentree, phoneline,
definite, fixed,
the self, too, then
caught real, clouds
and wind melting
into their directions,
breaking around and
over, down and out,
motions profound,
alive, musical! .....

{excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/24/travel/0824-SORIA_index.htm "A Poets Realm of Myth and Reality" article and slideshow about Machado's Spain.

[quasimodo1]

From Somewhere In Advance Of Nowhere

BUMBLEBEE, YOU SAW BIG MAMA

You saw Big Mama Thorton
In her cocktail dresses
& cut off boots
& in her cowboy hat
& man's suit
As she drummed &
Hollered out
The happy hour of her negritude
Bumblebee

You saw Big Mama
Trance dancing her chant
Into cut body of
A running rooster
Scream shouting her talk
Into flaming path of
A solar eclipse
Cry laughing her eyes into
Circumcision red sunsets
at midnight
Bumblebee

You saw Big Mama
Bouncing straight up like a Masai
Then falling back spinning her
Salty bone drying kisser of music
Into a Texas hop for you to
Lap up her sweat
Bumblebee

You saw Big Mama
Moaning between ritual saxes
& carrying the black water of Alabama blood
Through burnt weeds & rainy ditches
To reach the waxy surface of your spectrum
Bumblebee

You didn't have to wonder
Why Big Mama sounded
So expressively free
So aggressively great
Once you climbed
Into valley roar
Of her vocal spleen
& tasted sweet grapes
In cool desert
Of her twilight
Bumblebee

You saw Big Mama
Glowing like
A full charcoal moon
Riding down
Chocolate Bayou road
& making her entrance
Into rock-city-bar lounge
& swallowing that
Show-me-no-love supermarket exit sign
In her club ebony gut
You saw her
Get tamped on by the hell hounds
& you knew when she was happy ...


{excerpt, Jayne Cortez}

[quasimodo1]

Theory and Practice

By LANGDON HAMMER
Published: August 29, 2008
"Poets and critics have been around for a long time, and some writers have been both poets and critics, but the 'poet-critic' was invented in the 20th century. This hybrid role was created by T. S. Eliot and then adapted by a generation of poets who won positions in American colleges as literary critics, before the M.F.A. in creative writing gave poets jobs teaching writing workshops. The poet-critics of that era shared a point of view. They were against experimental literature. They valued rhyme and meter not only as expressive forms, but as safeguards against sentimentality, narcissism and even madness. They saw poetry as a way to preserve the individual’s spiritual and intellectual integrity in a society dominated by science and mass culture. They praised reason and proportion, but their mood was apocalyptic." {first paragraph of this review}

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/books/review/Hammer-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin

[JBI]

The River Pilgrim: A Letter

At eighteen, I thought the Sixhibaoux wept.
Five years younger, you were lush, beautiful
Mystery; your limbs — scrolls of deep water.
Before your home, lost in roses, I swooned,
Drunken in the village of Whylah Falls,
And brought you apple blossoms you refused,
Wanting Hand Snow woodsmoke blues and dried smelts,
Wanting some milljerk's dumb, unlettered love.
That May, freight chimed zylophone tracks that rang
To Montréal. I scribbled postcard odes,
Painted le fleuve Saint-Laurent come la Seine —
Sad watercolours for Negro exiles
In France, and drempt Paris white with lepers,
Soft cripples who finger pawns under elms,
Drink blurry into young debaucery,
Their glasses clear with Cointreau, rain and tears.

Continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/clarke/poem1.htm

This is from his verse novel Whylah Falls, which I am currently reading. So far it is absolutely incredible (75 of175). The influence of Pound's translation from Li Po is clear in this piece, though the central theme of Clarke's work in my opinion is African-Canadian Identity, and cultural identity in general. He seems quite the poet, and is somewhat of a renown academic in Canada, currently teaching in the English department at the University of Toronto.



On another note: just finished Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson; I found it interesting, but will wait to see if others have read it before discussing it more in depth, and posting my opinions/interpretations.

[stlukesguild]

JBI... I'm currently reading through Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson. I've read Plainwater some time ago. I'll probably finish in a day or so as I have the bad habit of reading several books at once... on top of the fact that school has just started back and I'm into lots of work on lesson plans, pacing charts, standards, and other nonsense. Any other takers? Surely Jozy would be up for a little foray into Carson.

[JBI]

Hummingbird by Milton Acorn.

One day in a lifetime
I saw one with wings
a pipesmoke blur
shaped like half a kiss
and its raspberry-stone
heart winked fast
in a thumbnail of a breast.

In that blink it
was around a briar
and out of sight, but
I caught a flash
of its brain
where flowers swing
udders of sweet cider;

Continued here: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/acorn/poem4.htm

Acorn is one of my favorite Canadian poets. His verse has the incredible value of not sounding like Wallace Stevens, like most other contemporary verse tends to do, and also has a fresh set of metaphor, and diction, giving it a distinctive flavor, and an imagistic feel that can only be described as Canadian.

[quasimodo1]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/books/01faraz.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin Obituary... Ahmed Faraz: Outspoken Urdu Poet, dies at 77 by Haresh Pandya, 9/1/08

[quasimodo1]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121883343091845417.html

[quasimodo1]

THE LAMMAS HIRELING

After the fair, I'd still a light heart
and a heavy purse, he struck so cheap.
And cattle doted on him: in his time
mine only dropped heifers, fat as cream.
Yields doubled. I grew fond of company
that knew when to shut up. Then one night,
disturbed from dreams of my dear late wife,
I hunted down her torn voice to his pale form.
Stock-still in the light from the dark lantern,
stark-naked but for one bloody boot of fox-trap,
I knew him a warlock, a cow with leather horns.
To go into the hare gets you muckle sorrow,
the wisdom runs, muckle care. I levelled
and blew the small hour through his heart.
The moon came out. By its yellow witness
I saw him fur over like a stone mossing.
His lovely head thinned. His top lip gathered.
His eyes rose like bread. I carried him
in a sack that grew lighter at every step
and dropped him from a bridge. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE INVISIBLE MENDER (My First Mother)

I'm sewing on new buttons
to this washed silk shirt.
Mother of pearl,
I chose them carefully.
In the haberdashers on Chepstow Place
I turned a boxful over
one by one,
searching for the backs with flaws:
those blemished green or pink or aubergine,
small birth marks on the creamy shell.
These afternoons are short,
the sunlight buried after three or four,
sap in the cold earth.
The trees are bare.
I'm six days late.
My right breast aches so
when I bend to catch a fallen button
that strays across the floor.
Either way,
there'll be blood on my hands.
Thirty-seven years ago you sat in poor light
and sewed your time away,
then left.
But I'm no good at this:
a peony of blood gathers on my thumb, falls
then widens on the shirt like a tiny, opening mouth.
I think of you like this —
as darkness comes,
as the window that I can't see through
is veiled with mist ... (excerpt)

[quasimodo1]

WATCHING FOR DOLPHINS


In the summer months on every crossing to Piraeus
One noticed that certain passengers soon rose
From seats in the packed saloon and with serious
Looks and no acknowledgement of a common purpose
Passed forward through the small door into the bows
To watch for dolphins. One saw them loose

Every other wish. Even the lovers
Turned their desires on the sea, and a fat man
Hung with equipment to photograph the occasion
Stared like a saint, through sad bi-focals; others,
Hopeless themselves, looked to the children for they
Would see dolphins if anyone would. Day after day

Or on their last opportunity all gazed
Undecided whether a flat calm were favourable
Or a sea the sun and the wind between them raised
to a likeness of dolphins. Were gulls a sign, that fell
Screeching from the sky or over an unremarkable place
Sat in a silent school? Every face

After its character implored the sea.
All, unaccustomed, wanted epiphany,
Praying the sky would clang and the abused Aegean
Reverberate with cymbal, gong and drum.
We could not imagine more prayer, and had they then
On the waved, on the climax of our longing come

Smiling, snub nosed, domed like satyrs, oh
We should have laughed and lifted the children up
Stranger to stranger, pointing how with a leap
They left their element, three or four times, centred
On grace, and heavily and warm re-entered,
Looping the keel. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

THE COMING OF THE COLD

I

The late peach yields a subtle musk,
The arbor is alive with fume
More heady than a field at dusk
When clover scents diminished wind.
The walker's foot has scarcely room
Upon the orchard path, for skinned
And battered fruit has choked the grass.
The yield's half down and half in air,
The plum drops pitch upon the ground,
And nostrils widen as they pass
The place where butternuts are found.
The wind shakes out the scent of pear.
Upon the field the scent is dry:
The dill bears up it acrid crown;
The dock, so garish to the eye,
Distills a pungence of its own;
And pumpkins sweat a bitter oil.
But soon cold rain and frost come in
To press pure fragrance to the soil;
The loose vine droops with hoar at dawn,
The riches of the air blow thin. ..... {excerpt, 1 0f 3 parts from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke}

[quasimodo1]

From The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke
PP 61-63

THE SHAPE OF THE FIRE

I

What's this? A dish for at lips
Who says? A nameless stranger.
Is he a bird or a tree? Not everyone can tell.

Water recedes to the crying of spiders.
An old scow bumps over black rocks.
A cracked pod calls.

Mother me out of here. What more will the bones allow?
Will the sea give the wind suck? A toad folds into a stone.
These flowers are all fangs. Comfort me, fury.
Wake me, witch, we'll do the dance of rotten sticks.

Shale loosens. Marl reaches into the field. Small birds pass over water.
Spirit, come near. This is only the edge of whiteness.
I can't laugh at a procession of dogs.

In the hour of ripeness the tree is barren.
The she-bear mopes under the hill.
Mother, mother, stir from your cave of sorrow.

A low mouth laps water. Weeds, weeds, how I love you.
The arbor is cooler. Farewell, farewell, fond worm.
The warm comes without sound.

II

Where's the eye?
The eye's in the sty.
The ear's not here
Beneath the hair.
When I took off my clothes
To find a nose,
There was only one shoe
For the waltz of To,
The pinch of Where.

Time for the flat-headed man. I recognize that listener,
Him with the platitudes and rubber doughnuts,
Melting a the knees a varicose horror.
Hello, hello. My nerves knew you, dear boy.
Have you come to unhinge my shadow?
Last night I slept in the pits of a tongue.
The silver fish ran in and out of my special bindings;
I grew tired of the ritual of names and the assistant keeper of the
Mollusks:
Up over a viaduct I came, to the snakes and sticks of another winter,
A two-legged dog hunting a new horizon of howls.
The wind sharpened itself on a rock;
A voice sang:

Pleasure on ground
Has no sound,
Easily maddens
The uneasy man.

Who, careless, slips
In coiling ooze
Is trapped to the lips,
Leaves mare than shoes;



Must pull off clothes
To jerk like a frog
On belly and nose
From the sucking bog.

My meat eats me. Who waits at the gate?
Mother of quartz, your words writhe into my ear.
Renew the light, lewd whisper.
{2 of 5 parts}