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**********after Haydn, Op. 64, No. 2, Adagio
It is quiet now.
The nameless officers for State Security
shrug on their overcoats
and head home through pre-dawn streets.
Oiled locks
turn, then turn again.
The general snores.
You will think it cold,
the way it fingers
open eyes, the darkened cheekbones,
the blood between the legs. ...
{excerpt}
Jan Zwicky
Pasted from <http://www.cstone.net/~poems/histozwi.htm>
Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
{excerpt from AUBADE, last stanza of this poem}
...Yet her poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons,
vaults, cages, bars, curbs, bits, bolts, fetters,
locked windows, narrow frames, aching walls.
“Why all the fuss?” asks one critic.
“She wanted liberty. Well didn’t she have it?
A reasonably satisfactory homelife,
a most satisfactory dreamlife—why all this beating of wings?
What was this cage, invisible to us,
which she felt herself to be confined in?”
Well there are many ways of being held prisoner,
I am thinking as I stride over the moor.
As a rule after lunch mother has a nap
and I go out to walk.
The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April
carve into me with knives of light.
Something inside it reminds me of childhood—
it is the light of the stalled time after lunch
when clocks tick
and hearts shut
and fathers leave to go back to work
and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering
something they never tell.
You remember too much, ... {excerpt from long poem, THE GLASS ESSAY}
TALKING TO THE MOON
A defeated politician is in circulation
again, as we say of coins,
and his mouth is full of words.
His words have all been handled smooth.
They'd shrink, like lozenges, except
some sweat from everyone who's had them
is on them. He could be you,
why don't you support him?
But some people hoard words.
"The year the lake froze all the way
across . . . ," a sentence might begin
and then nod, sleepy in a hot kitchen.
The words are a spell to make the lake
freeze again. The sentence never ends. ... {excerpt}
THE DEFINITION OF GARDENING
....."Horticulture is a groping in the dark
into the obscure and unfamiliar,
kneeling before a disinterested secret,
slapping it, punching it like a Chinese puzzle,
birdbrained, babbling gibberish, dig and
destroy, pull out and apply salt,
hoe and spray, before it spreads, burn roots,
where not desired, with gloved hands, poisonous,
the self-sacrifice of it, the self-love,
into the interior, thunderclap, excruciating,
through the nose, the earsplitting necrology
of it, the withering, shriveling,
the handy hose holder and Persian insect powder
and smut fungi, the enemies of the iris,
wireworms are worse than their parents,
there is no way out, flowers as big as heads,
pock-marked, disfigured, blinking insolently
at me, the me who so loves to garden
because it prevents the heaving of the ground
and the untimely death of porch furniture,
and dark, murky days in a large city
and the dream home under a permanent storm
is also a factor to keep in mind."
{excerpt}
Outer Space
If you could turn the moon
on a lathe, you would
because you are curious.
And that would explain
why the moon slivers,
but explain it stupidly
by not taking care
to ask how the moon rounds.
And so we go, stupid ideas
for feet. The better to wander
with, retort the feet,
and what can you say,
you who shaved those taut
spirals from the moon,
kinks of tightening light
that fell away from your attention
to your work growing smaller
the better you did it?
{excerpt}
****FROG!...
***** *****
Abstract in nature, yet so very important to it. He is the warning sign,
the innervision to peace or self-destruction. Calmly and confidently in
eyes wide open he watches and protects the inner being of innocence
and the beauty of nature inspires him to love and give. He is not ugly!
And the prince is not a prince. But he can be crazy like a poet
clinging to the words of Gods and Demons and the drama of your
sneers and snickers of him. This is love for all of you stuck in
boredom and the intense madness of our darkside. In the danger of
the Forest he does not seperate his emotions. ...
{excerpt}
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/21/bo...r=1&ref=review --- ‘Poetry’s Shadow’
By KARL KIRCHWEY
Published: December 19, 2008 --- Here is a first book written from a very high floor of the Tower of Babel, and
the view is exhilarating. --- a review of AN AQUARIUM
Poems
By Jeffrey Yang
63 pp. Graywolf Press. Paper, $15
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/ma..._r=1&ref=books --- The Lure of Death
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
Published: December 24, 2008 --- Death is the ultimate subject for a poet. It’s the ultimate subject for all of
us, of course — the self impossibly contemplating its impossible absence — but for a poet whose work is to express
the inexpressible, it is a particular opportunity. “I had often wished for some dread disease . . . /Overwhelmed by
some unspecific disappointment or frustration, or joy, I longed for the “clarity” an illness might bring./It’s
beautiful to have enemies you can see!” Jason Shinder wrote in a journal he called “Cancer Book.”...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/bo..._r=1&ref=books --- --- The Bard of Despond
By DAVID BARBER
Published: December 25, 2008
"In spite of being considered armed and dangerous in so many precincts of American poetry that his mug shot ought to
be stapled up in the post office, there’s still as of this writing no price on William Logan’s head. But you wouldn’t
have much trouble rounding up plaintiffs for a class-action suit: arguably the most industrious and notorious poet-
critic to brandish that hyphen like a knife between his teeth since his acknowledged master Randall Jarrell was on
the prowl, Logan has perfected the gentle art of raising hackles by practicing poetry criticism as a blood sport
rather than a parlor game. Any old reviewer can ruffle feathers. Logan collects scalps." --- Review of STRANGE FLESH
By William Logan
93 pp. Penguin Poets. Paper, $18
From Poetry, January 2009
IDIOT PSALMS
I. a psalm of Isaak, accompanied by Jew's harp.
O God Beloved if obliquely so,
dimly apprehended in the midst
of this, the fraught obscuring fog
of my insufficiently capacious ken,
Ostensible Lover of our kind-- while
apparently aloof-- allow
that I might glimpse once more
Your shadow in the land, avail
for me, a second time, the sense
of dire Presence in the pulsing
hollow near the heart.
Once more, O lord, from Your enormity incline
your Face to shine upon Your servant, shy
of immolation, if You will.
{first of four parts}
II
The day’s at end and there’s nowhere to go,
Draw to the fire, even this fire is dying;
Get up and once again politely lying
Invite the ladies toward the mistletoe
With greedy eyes that stare like an old crow.
How pleasantly the holly wreaths did hang
And how stuffed Santa did his reindeer clang
Above the golden oaken mantel, years ago!
Then hang this picture for a calendar,
As sheep for goat, and pray most fixedly
For the cold martial progress of your star,
With thoughts of commerce and society,
Well-milked Chinese, Negroes who cannot sing,
The Huns gelded and feeding in a ring.
III
Give me this day a faith not personal
As follows: The American people fully armed
With assurance policies, righteous and harmed,
Battle the world of which they’re not at all.
That lying boy of ten who stood in the hall,
His hat in hand (thus by his father charmed:
“You may be President”), was not alarmed
Nor even left uneasy by his fall.
{excerpt from four part poem: MORE SONNETS FOR CHRISTMAS}
Little Low Heavens
A talented verse mechanic cracks open the hood to illuminate the structure and ignition points that make a poem rev up and roar forever.
by Clive James
Any poem that does not just slide past us like all those thousands of others usually has an ignition point for our attention. To take the most startling possible example, think of “Spring,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Everyone knows the first line because everyone knows the poem. “Nothing is so beautiful as Spring” is a line that hundreds of poets could have written, and was probably designed to sound that way: designed, that is, to be merely unexceptionable, or even flat. Only two lines further on, however, we get “Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens” and we are electrified. I can confidently say “we” because nobody capable of reading poetry at all could read those few words and not feel the wattage. Eventually we see that the complete poem is fitting, in its every part, for its task of living up to the standards of thought and perception set by that single flash of illumination.
But we wouldn’t even be checking up if we had not been put on the alert by a lightning strike of an idea that goes beyond thought and perception and into the area of metaphorical transformation that a poem demands. A poem can do without satisfying that demand, but it had better have plenty of other qualities to make up for the omission, even if the omission is deliberate, and really I wonder if there can be any successful poem, even the one disguised as an unadorned prose argument, which is not dependent on this ability to project you into a reality so drastically rearranged that it makes your hair fizz even when it looks exactly like itself. {from an article published in Poetry Magazine -- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/jour...html?id=182120 }