fragments of contemporary poetry

TRANSCENDENCE
Beauty and colors so pleasing to the eye,
Stars and planets in the dark sky,
The ratio in the circle denoted by pi,
The surging of the seas and the marvel of the fly

The splendor of the flowers that blossom and die:
All these were there as eons rolled by.
But neither plants nor trees, nor beasts nor birds
Described all these in rhymes or in words.

Nature and her laws were occult in the dark,
Till consciousness came, and lit them with its spark.
How did this happen, for what purpose and whence?
Could the answer for this be in Transcendence?

BLUE MONDAY


Blue of the heaps of beads poured into her breasts
and clacking together in her elbows;
blue of the silk
that covers lily-town at night;
blue of her teeth
that bite cold toast
and shatter on the streets;
blue of the dyed flower petals with gold stamens
hanging like tongues
over the fence of her dress
at the opera/opals clasped under her lips
and the moon breaking over her head a
gush of blood-red lizards.
Blue Monday. Monday at 3:00 and
Monday at 5. Monday at 7:30 and
Monday at 10:00. Monday passed under the rippling
California fountain. Monday alone
a shark in the cold blue waters.
*********************You are dead: wound round like a paisley shawl.
*********************I cannot shake you out of the sheets. Your name
*********************is still wedged in every corner of the sofa.
*********************Monday is the first of the week,
*********************and I think of you all week.
*********************I beg Monday not to come
*********************so that I will not think of you
*********************all week.
You paint my body blue. On the balcony
in the softy muddy night, you paint me
with bat wings and the crystal
the crystal
the crystal
the crystal in your arm cuts away
the night, folds back ebony whale skin
and my face, the blue of new rifles,
and my neck, the blue of Egypt,
and my breasts, the blue of sand,
and my arms, bass-blue,
and my stomach, arsenic;
there is electricity dripping from me like cream;
there is love dripping from me I cannot use—like acacia or
jacaranda—fallen blue and gold flowers, crushed into the street. {excerpt}

Hermann Hesse



(translated by James Wright)

PAINTER'S JOY

Acres bear corn and cost money.
Meadows are surrounded by barbed wire,
Terrible need and avarice laid side by side
Everything looks wasted and closed in.

But here in my eye another order of things
Goes on living: violet ebbs away
And the purple flows on its throne, and I sing
My innocent song.

Yellow by yellow, and yellow next to red.
Cool blue turns to the color of rose.
Light and color leap from world to world,
Arch and echo away in a surging of love.

{excerpt}

Talking Poetry

Thursday, September 25, 2008
7:14 PM

(title of book from the U. of New Mexico Press, copyright 1987)
(subtitle=Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary Poets)
(author= Lee Bartlett)

While sifting through some old volumes, this book, TALKING POETRY, got my attention because
The poets who were interviewed were mostly unknown to anyone familiar with the who's who of contemporary poetry of this present period. The authors included in this volume were:

Clark Coolidge
Theodore Enslin
Clayton Eshleman
William Everson
Thom Gunn
Kenneth Irby
Michael Palmer
Tom Raworth
Ishmael Reed
Stephen Rodefer
Nathaniel Tarn
Diane Wakoski
Anne Waldman

In searching these poets online and in library database, the only poets "making the cut" at this time are:

Eshleman, Everson, Gunn, Palmer, Reed, Wakoski, and Waldman.

Of these, in my opinion only three composed poetry passing this very limited test of time.
See posts following for examples.

de Kooning's Woman I

from From Scratch, Black Sparrow Press, 1998.


is the first in a series, probably not
in de Kooning's sense of it primal woman or
first-earliest-woman, but these facets may have been
on his mind, for we have here a series or "ones,"
a sacrificed and dismembered "goddess,"
a kind of North American Coyolxauhqui
whose circular Stone was discovered at the foot of the Great
Temple stairway,
as well as Madonna and Child,
the Child at once just born and maybe four,
he is bald and white, in the Madonna's left shoulder and arm,
staring at Her, perched on what appears to be
Her ruddy left thigh, which
on closer inspection might also be
the rump of a flat-snouted or headless animal
lunging to the right, whose back and legs are Her lap and legs,
lunging into the shredding legs of the figure who uses
the Madonna's right shoulder and arm as his breast and stomach
(which is also a red-gartered, chubby, severed thigh)-
he has long, loosely-tied hair, or is "he" a widwife
with face hair-a pirate? sniffing
or whispering to the Madonna's right temple?
His breast-stomach is also his right arm
swinging under the Madonna's haltered and huge right breast,
and out of his splitting hand
another hand emerges from which
shears protrude cutting the Child's umbilicus?
Or is a castration under way?

All this action is simultaneously
splintered and frozen,
once we see the Child, the animal, and pirate-midwife,
there's not much left of Woman I, or
let's say she's in sacrificial drag,
all but her head and breasts are others
masquerading as her body parts,
she is a crowned tripod of wedge-head and dome-shielded breasts,
dismembered and whole? or have her body parts been stuffed into
new roles?
Over-sized Mesopotamian eyes, hypnotic,
teeth like a porticullisbeaver-set into her face,
the gaze of one who has been blasted,
the left eye straight ahead,
as wide open animal jaws howl at her earless head,
the right eye more inward, averted,
reflecting on what pirate-midwife is hissing-

{excerpt, 2 of 3 stanzas}

FALSE PORTRAIT OF D.B. AS NICCOLO PAGANINI



Those who have lived here since before
time are gone while the ones who must
replace them have not yet arrived.


The streets are wet with a recent
rain yet you continue to count
first minutes and hours then trees


rocks, windows, mailboxes, streetlights
and pictographs refusing to
rest even for the brief span it


would take to dry off, change clothes and
reemerge grotesque yet oddly
attractive like Paganini


whose mother was visited by
a seraph in Genoa not
long before his birth and who is


thought now to have acquired much of
his technical wizardry as
a result of Marfan’s syndrome


a quite common anomaly
of the connective tissues which
may well account for the tall and


angular body, muscular
underdevelopment as well
as the hypermobile joints that


eventuated on the stage
in a peculiar stance, a
spectacular bowing technique


and an awesome mastery of
the fingerboard. He would bring his
left hip forward to support his


body’s weight. His left shoulder, thrust
forward also, would enable
him to rest his left elbow on


his chest, a buttress against the
stress of forceful bowing along
with debilitating muscle


fatigue. The looseness of the right
wrist and shoulder gave pliancy
leading to broad acrobatic


bowing. The ‘spider’ fingers of
his left hand permitted a range
on the fingerboard which many


attributed to black magic
for Paganini was said to
have signed a pact with Lucifer


to acquire virtuosity
as a small child. After his death
perhaps due in part to this tale


in part also to rumours of
gambling and wild debauchery
the Church refused to allow him


burial on hallowed ground. In
consequence his body was moved
furtively from place to place


until after many years and
for reasons still mysterious
the Church finally relented.


A few paradoxes should be
noted as an afterward. Though
accused of charlatanism he


was rewarded for his skill like
no one before him. He loved his
violin above all yet once


he gambled it away at cards.
{excerpt}

Review entitled "The Roustabout" by David Orr 9/26/08 of Clive James' new book: OPAL SUNSET, SELECTED POEMS, 1958-2008 (Norton, 25.95) ... http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/bo...a2&oref=slogin

Sarah Lindsay


From Poetry, October, 2008

ELEGY FOR THE QUAGGA

Krakatau split with a blinding noise
And raised from gutted, steaming rock
A pulverized black sky, over water walls
That swiftly fell on Java and Sumatra.
Fifteen days before, in its cage in Amsterdam,
The last known member of Equus quagga,
The southernmost subspecies of zebra, died.
Most of the wild ones, not wild enough,
Grazing near the Cape of Good Hope,
Had been shot and skinned and roasted by white hunters.

When a spider walked on cooling Krakatau's skin,
No quagga walked anywhere. While seeds
Pitched by long winds onto newborn fields
Burst open and rooted, perhaps some thistle
Flourished on the quagga's discarded innards.
The fractured island greened and hummed again;
Handsome zebras tossed their heads
In zoos, on hired safari plains.
Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?
Or see the warm hide twitch away a fly, ... {excerpt}

From Poetry magazine, October 2008

IN THE DRINK

"He would have gone to Hell ageine, and earnest sute did make:
But charon would not suffer him to passe the Stygian lake."
--Ovid, Metamorphoses
(Tr. By Arthur Golding)

Never mind phantom forms, the Keaton--crash
That dumped us in that sea-fed swamp,
The Dutch kill, Latin nihil, thing without
Opposite-- attend instead the transcendent,

The flying, for god's sake, what we saw
The moment before we thwocked overboard:
A heron stutter-flapped and lifted off,
Clumsy as a wind-mauled tarp at first,

But couth beyond sublime once clear
Of cattail punks and saltgrass tips,
The overturned rowboat's rusted hull.
Or the cormorant that plunked and dipped,

Rose flipping fish from beak to tongue
And down its neck, water beading on its head.
But the crown that really pleased the crowd
My maiden voyage was iridescent green,

Brilliantined, a merganser's spiky coxcomb.
He swam right by, chasing red herrings
And crackling so happily I had to pull
A feather from his cap. And so I surfaced

Solo. I tell myself, I only launch the bark,
I never book the seats. ... {excerpt}

PILGRIMAGE

We drive home, the valley floor
flooded with darkness, the baby inside you floating
head down, swaying when the car
turns, a sleeper within
a sleeper. A glove

of moonlight on my hand, I remember
the lake in Maine, my friend angry,
challenging me to swim with him across. We vanished

and reappeared in the swells, flailing,
filling and emptying our hands. I found him floating
on his back, his face warm in the sun, the lake
holding him, hiding him. I won't

wake you, a shadowy rush
of farms and meadows the way they streamed past
the train to Barcelona, you and I sleeping uneasily,
the racket of hammering rails in the tunnels, and out,
the ocean beside us, calm in moonlight.
We stopped, jarred awake
in our little berths.

We climbed into the bus where your purse
was picked-it must have been there-crowded into
the aisle, the small boy behind you,
his terrific concentration.

We got off too soon, and walked
block after block of urban housing: blank,
evacuated. What appeared to be a mountain of rubbish

heaving itself in spires and geysers into the sky
was La Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's unfinished nightmare
Temple of the Holy Family, an empty shell

as if bombed out, tilted
treelike columns spiraling upward, parabolic
arches and helicoidal surfaces, an eerie warping,
flutter and undulation of angel and snail, its domes
and cupolas encrusted with broken tiles,
cups, plates, and pieces of glass,
called by the local people
The Cathedral of the Poor. ... {excerpt}

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/02/bo...b3&oref=slogin Review entitled "Tripping To and Fro, Happily Skewering Poetry" by Janet Maslin, 10/1/08 of Billy Collins' new book BALLISTICS

ONE ART

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
{excerpt}

From The Colossus and other poems

BLUE MOLES

1. They're out of the dark's ragbag, these two
Moles dead in the pebbled rut,
Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart--
Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.
One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,
Little victim unearthed by some large
creature
From his orbit under the elm root.
The second carcass makes a duel of the
Affair:
Blind twins bitten by bad nature.

The sky's far dome is sane and clear.
Leaves, undoing their yellow caves
Between the road and the lake water,
Bare no sinister spaces. Already
The moles look neutral as the stones.
Their corkscrew noses, their white hands
Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.
Difficult to imagine how fury struck--
Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.

2. Nightly the battle-shouts start up
In the ear of the veteran, and again
I enter the soft pelt of the mole.
Light's death to them: they shrivel in it.
They move through their mute rooms while
I sleep,
Palming the earth aside, grubbers
After the fat children of root and rock.
By day, only the topsoil heaves.
Down there one is alone.
{excerpt}

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jul/26/poetry Interview "Olds' Worlds" by Marianne Macdonald (photograph of Sharon Olds)

From The Face of the Earth

MAKING YOUR OWN ECLIPSE

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,

the cool band of air
in her shadow racing
about as close as it can,

to plunge into the gold spot
where the magnified Sun
will sail under the same perfect pearl.

{excerpt}