fragments of contemporary poetry

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}

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

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/ma...d.asp?id-12340

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}

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)

http://www.theparisreview.com/viewin...hp/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

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

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}

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/200...POD_index.html

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/fullpag...+Cortez&st=nyt

".....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}

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}

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}

http://poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0...em_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}

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/bo...d-letters.html