Favorite contemporary poets?

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:
cloud, bird, fox, the flow of light, the dancing
pilgrimage of water, vast stillness
of spellbound ephemerae on a lit windowpane,
animal voices, mineral hum, wind
conversing with rain, ocean with rock, stuttering
of fire to coal--then something tethered
in us, hobbled like a donkey on its patch
of gnawed grass and thistles, breaks free. .......................
{excerpt from this poem by Denise Levertov)

KINDLY


............And, like yours,

their eyes keep roaming
around the waiting room

as if it's not comforting exactly
but more like reassuring

to know others suffer.
You exchange looks.

Yours, you worry, shows concern.
Her kindly nod seems to say

there's no cure for fate.
His pleased, determined smile

suggests he'd just as soon scoff
at any prognosis.




© by William Aarnes {latter part of this poem}

FOR JOHN HAAG, LOGGER, SAILOR, HOUSEPAINTER, POET, PROFESSOR, AND GROWER OF ORCHIDS



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“I found myself in a dark wood
where the right way was lost”
--Dante, Inferno, Canto 1, 1-2

In our College of Glooms
he sauntered about in leather pants
striding the halls as if they were a deck
from his sailing days in the Merchant Marine
as if he were here on shore leave
and had to make ship in Seattle
tailing trucks through snowy foothills
as flurries veered at his windshield
and brake lights blinked ahead on the turns
as he chanted to himself and the snow
all the poems he ever learned alone
on moon-washed nights when waves were listening:
Dylan Thomas. Wallace Stevens.
"The Astabula Bridge Disaster."
—squinting into the dark and saying poems,
overtaking a truck on the straightaway
driving hard until he hit Puget Sound
where the sea rushed the rocks on the beach
under a fat moon wreathed in fog
and the bellbuoy chimed all night.
{first stanza of this poem by contemporary poet John Balaban}

A GIFT OF MORNING WATER



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After the long night with a cold wind riffling the scrim of the teepee lit like a lantern in the deserted prairie, a night of chills in the small of the back, aches in crossed legs, after all the hours of chanting from Indians and Anglos, after their drumming on the iron kettle stretched with hide, its water-filled belly bellowing when tipped, after the prayers sung for forgiveness, for guidance from the grandfather peyote on the crescent of sand, after chewing bitter buttons, swallowing dry powder, after the drumming and the singing and the sweet sage thrown on the image-dancing fire, as the embers died and dawn finally rinsed the top of the tent, the Road Chief, an elderly Tiwa who throughout the night had asked "Him" to show us the right road, said: "A woman is coming with morning water. Listen to her. She is your mother." .........{beginning of prose poem by John Balaban}

BASEMENT OCCUPATIONS



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Charred coffee zipped and sizzled
on the burner as a greasy ungloved hand
removed the pot then sloshed more
fingers of fuming tar into the cup.

A lip smack, indifferent sigh and a single
cloudy bead of sweat dropped straight off
the nose—it could be an interrogation
chamber, raked with hundred-watt bare light.

That array of pungent household poisons—
the chipped and dented cellar cabinets
holding jars of solvents, cans of reeking
pigments, paints, and tubs of cracking glue,

....

{first part of this poem by contemporary poet, Jim Murphy}

APOLOGIA TO MARS AND MOON


Let me be what awaited me yesterday, and let me resist
tomorrow in a fistful of poppies and dust.

—Pablo Neruda




To right, from lone perspective, the moon waxing
one night from full; to left, the red planet
closer than it has been for sixty thousand years,
will be again for a hundred lifetimes. A man
prone on a pallet of wood, hard, but not hardness
of stone, surety, rather of a conversation
of bone and flesh, tree transformed to function.
Let us not discuss nations, ages, intrusions,
nor when this moment will fall and disappoint. ...........

{excerpt from poem by contemporary poet Gaylord Brewer}

THREE VARIATIONS ON THE SUSPENSION OF TIME

1

Roll Call

The evening adjourns: the contrail intersects
the guy-wire; the robins peck the trash to death;
six blocks away, traffic winds the roads like clocks;

on the porch, paint curls into a self-portrait
of Van Gogh who has lost his hat;
the sun terrorizes the brilliant daisies.

So little time remains to ambush the sky
under the lively, silver applause of cottonwoods—
the red clouds and blue wind spiral together alone

against the curve that leaves us all here standing.

....
{first part of this poem by contemporary poet Michael Catherwood}

Alessandra Lynch and Deborah Tall

I'll post some of their work later--

THE MUSE AT THE DOOR /wanted a word with the poet whose house this was.
“But he’s not here,” I said.

“Didn’t he send you a change of address?”
The heat panted, like the dog it was, at her heels.

The wind chime said nothing, there being no wind.
She laid an envelope on the poet’s pillow.


.............
{excerpt from this poem by Debora Greger, featured poet in Yale Review}

FINISHING UP THE NOVEL AFTER SOME DELAY



I followed a stream plunging out of the jungle
and spilling around boulders broken loose
from the great shade of the triple canopy
where screw-pines walked on hairy stilts below teak
and towering coffin trees, their blue-green trunks
festooned with yellow orchids. Leaf monkeys
hid in banyans as I went by.

A sandfly cloud seesawed the mudflat
and I turned to go the other way
through thickets splattered in sunshine
where green rollers shrieked and bobbed in bamboo,
the cool palms threshing above my head.
the earth, spongy; the air, damp.

A blue-tailed babbler screeched high up
above the nattering stream. Downriver,
some women waded pools with dip nets
as their kids chased fish in the weirs.
I passed unseen behind the jungle wall. ..............

{excerpt from this poem by John Balaban}

SLEEP POEM

In sleep we reach into our Selves
like hands taking food from ovens.
Our Selves eat our Selves to save our Selves.
In the great kitchen of the night
we are both bread and knife.

In the city of the great kitchen of the night
we are the huge trucks that enter
purposefully as sperm
bringing ripe apricots from California.

...................

{excerpt from this poem by Al Zolynas, from his collection, "the New Physics"}

METAPHOR TO ACTION

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Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform,
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words,
whether it is the crash of lips on lips
after absence and wanting : we must close
the circuits of ideas, now generate,
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose.

Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky,
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame,
here is the man night-walking who derives
tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting ;
here we require the proof in solidarity,
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating.

{first two stanzas of "Metaphor to Action" by Muriel Rukeyser}