fragments of contemporary poetry

THE PARABOLIC BALLAD
My life, like a rocket, makes a parabola
flying in darkness, -- no rainbow for traveler.

There once lived an artist, red-haired Gauguin,
he was a bohemian, a former tradesman.
To get to the Louvre
from the lanes of Montmartre
he circled around
as far as Sumatra!

He had to abandon the madness of money,
the filth of the scholars, the snarl of his honey.
The man overcame the terrestrial gravity,
The priests, drinking beer, would laugh at his "vanity":
"A straight line is short, but it is much too simple,
He'd better depict beds of roses for people."

And yet, like a rocket, he flew off with ease
through winds penetrating his coat and his ears.
He didn't fetch up to the Louvre through the door
but, like a parabola,
pierced the floor!

Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola.
{excerpt} - { http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/20...-77/?ref=books } - { http://zhurnal.lib.ru/a/alec_v/voncollhtm.shtml }

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New...-Poetry/64249/

http://media.poetryinternational.org/stream/

NOX

By Anne Carson

Illustrated. Unpaged. New Directions. $29.95 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/bo...tml?ref=review --- Review By BEN RATLIFF
Published: June 3, 2010 "Lamentation"

a review of "One More Theory about Happiness" by Paul Guest: review entitled "The Art of Pain" by Christopher R. Beha 6/3/10 / 202pp Ecco/Harper Collins 21.99 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/bo...html?ref=books

LIMITS

Only he
Remembered the day we met
And only I
The day we said goodbye:
“Last day of  June, our first blackberry pie,”
He always said.
A wood fire in the summer kitchen,
The hottest day.... A squall in the bedroom.
I can’t remember.


Nor he,
The December cube of  clay,
The storm the day before,
How the bare trees
Played Giant Step in the dawn wind,
Or how
On the other bed, rhythmically
Touching her knuckles to the wall,
My mother slipped forever into fantasy.


Only he
Remembered the spoken hate
(Its change too sheepish to impart)
Saw daggers still growing
In bristling clump out of my heart.


{EXCERPT}



NOTES: This poem is part of a special section of Poetry magazine's May issue



Source: Poetry (May 2010).

Excerpt from "Nervous System"

When you look down
inside yourself
what is there?

You are a walking bag of surgical instruments
shining from the inside out

and that’s just
today

Tomorrow it could be different

When I think of the childhood inside me I think of sunlight dying
on a windowsill

The voices of my friends
in the sunlight

All of us running around
outside of our
deaths


--- http://www.coppercanyonpress.org/300...ading_room.cfm

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/bo...tml?ref=review Review of THE ANTHOLOGIST by Nicholson Baker (review entitled "Ryme and Unreason" by David Orr, September 1, 2009) Also, excerpt from the book... { http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/bo...rr-t.html?_r=1 } -- published September 4, 2009. "Novels about poetry are a dodgy proposition. After all, novelists already have a near monopoly on narrative and discursive fiction — turf once claimed by poetry — and it seems almost impolite for our prose writers, having triumphed so thoroughly over their sister art, to set themselves up as tour guides to poetry’s dwindling estate. And let’s face it, stories involving poets tend to be hokey or, worse, excruciatingly literary." quote from the review

But Cummings saw it clearly, though he said he did not go to the Soviet Union with any specific agenda in mind. Early in the book, he has this conversation, which he transcribed in his idiosyncratic style with a hotel clerk:

“Have you any rooms?” I said.

“Yes” (not at all disagreeably).

“How much are they?”

“five dollars. But that includes breakfast.”

“Five… The redfox leans toward me. Why do you wish to go to Russia?

because I’ve never been there.

(He slumps,recovers). You are interested in economic and sociological problems?

no.

Perhaps you are aware that there has been a change of government in recent years?

yes(I say without being able to suppress a smile).

And your sympathies are not with socialism?

may I be perfectly frank?

Please!

I know almost nothing about these important matters and care even less.

(His eyes appreciate my answer). For what do you care?

my work.

Which is writing?

and painting.

What kind of writing?

chiefly verse;some prose.

Then you wish to go to Russia as a writer and painter? Is that it?

no;I wish to go as myself.

(An almost smile). Do you realize that to go as what you call Yourself will cost a great deal?

I’ve been told so.

{from ‘EIMI: A Journey Through Soviet Russia’ }http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...eecummings.jpg

ENDLESS INTER-STATES


1


They go down to the expressways, baskets
In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels
And watering cans, they go down to pick


Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down
In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing
By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those


Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down
Remembering the glide of automobiles, the
Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching,


Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s
In the trunk of the car. They go down, past
The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport


Soil from deep in the earth, and are content
To have the day before them, are content to imagine
Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures


Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of
Plant life, sustainable abundance,
An idea of sufficient that is global. Or,


Because cars now move on rails underground,
The elevated roads are covered in earth,
Vines drape around belts of green, snake


Through cities, overgrown and teeming
With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall
Of our own devising, and the night


Watchmen with their machine guns
Keeping humans, the intoxicated,
Out. I am sorry for this version, offer


You coffee, hot while there is still
Coffee this far north, while there is still news
To wake up to, and seasons


Vaguely reminiscent of seasons.



2


Web-toed she walks into the land, fins
Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation
A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau,


Quaint, at least that is my dream of her,
Big shouldered, out there daydreaming
The world into existence, pleasuring herself


With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake
But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping
In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by


Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she
Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries
To reattach things, but why? What if the world


Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing?
She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets
Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling


Itself on to the next.



3


Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless.
She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is
Always picking up after someone. But what? What


Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus
Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing
Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and


Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns,
Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out,
Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers


In the knotted oak, classic movies run on
The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred
Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over,


She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular,
Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a
Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked.


It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature
Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl
Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal


Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death
As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned.
Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic


Self and sees mariners floating, Ben
Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting
From the river bank, planked skirts on Front,


China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic
Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good.
Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching


Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move
Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other
Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities.
{excerpt, 3 of 6 parts} { http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/queyras/ }http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...eyras_sina.jpg

September 1961

This is the year the old ones,
the old great ones
leave us alone on the road.

The road leads to the sea.
We have the words in our pockets,
obscure directions. The old ones

have taken away the light of their presence,
we see it moving away over a hill
off to one side.

They are not dying,
they are withdrawn
into a painful privacy

learning to live without words.
E. P. "It looks like dying"--Williams: "I can't
describe to you what has been

happening to me"--
H. D. "unable to speak."
The darkness

twists itself in the wind, the stars
are small, the horizon
ringed with confused urban light-haze.

They have told us
the road leads to the sea,
and given

the language into our hands.
We hear
our footsteps each time a truck

has dazzled past us and gone
leaving us new silence.
One can't reach

the sea on this endless
road to the sea unless
one turns aside at the end, it seems,

follows
the owl that silently glides above it
aslant, back and forth,

and away into deep woods. ... --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...seLevertov.jpg

{excerpt}

Evening Hawk

From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through
Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds,
Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding
The last tumultuous avalanche of
Light above pines and the guttural gorge,
The hawk comes.


His wing
Scythes down another day, his motion
Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear
The crashless fall of stalks of Time.


The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error.


Look! Look! he is climbing the last light
Who knows neither Time nor error, and under
Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings
Into shadow.


Long now,
The last thrush is still, the last bat
Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. ... {excerpt}
Copyright © 1985 by Robert Penn Warren.
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...nnWarren-1.jpg
Source: From New and Selected Poems 1923-1985 (1985) ---

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,http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...watercolor.jpg
alive, musical! ...
{excerpt & self-portrait, watercolor}

Jayne Cortez: Online Poems


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

There It Is

And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organize and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps...line_poems.htm --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...respitters.jpg

Chinese Whispersby John Ashbery

John Ashbery
And in a little while we broke under the strain:
suppurations ad nauseam, the wanting to be taller,
though it‘s simply about being mysterious, i.e., not taller,
like any tree in any forest.
Mute, the pancake describes you.
It had tiny roman numerals embedded in its rim.
It was a pancake clock. They had ’em in those days,
always getting smaller, which is why they finally became extinct.
It was a hundred years before anyone noticed.
The governor general
called it “sinuous.” But we, we had other names for it,
knew it was going to be around for a long time,
even though extinct. And sure as shillelaghs fall from trees
onto frozen doorsteps, it came round again
when all memory of it had been expunged
from the common brain.
Everybody wants to try one of those new pancake clocks.
A boyfriend in the next town had one
but conveniently forgot to bring it over each time we invited him.
Finally the rumors grew more fabulous than the real thing:
I hear they are encrusted with tangles of briar rose,
so dense
not even a prince seeking the Sleeping Beauty could get inside.
What’s more, there are more of them than when they were extinct,
yet the prices keep on rising. They have them in the Hesperides
and in shantytowns on the edge of the known world,
blue with cold. All downtowns used to feature them.
Camera obscuras,
too, were big that year. But why is it that with so many people
who want to know what a shout is about, nobody can find the original recipe?
All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
less noticeable things. And the past is forgotten till next time.
How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
careless of being touched. Some took each others’ trash out,
put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
before anyone noticed, that it was like a chiaroscuro
of collapsing clouds.
How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.
More
keeps coming out, about the dogs I mean. Surely a simple embrace
from an itinerant fish would have been spurned at certain periods. Not now.
There is a famine of years in the land, the women are beautiful,
but prematurely old and worn. It doesn’t get better. Rocks half-buried
in bands of sand, and spontaneous execrations.
I yell to the ship’s front door,
wanting to be taller, and somewhere in the middle all this gets lost.
I was a phantom for a day. My friends carried me around with them. ... {excerpt} --- http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/z...nAshberyco.jpg