fragments of contemporary poetry

[quasimodo1]

To abdullah kurraz: It seems you have a firm grasp on contemporary poetry yourself, Doc. Surely you have a favorite poet you could add to this thread. Thanks for tuning in. q1

[quasimodo1]

Aphorisms Regarding Impatience
by Ellen Hinsey

1.
Mythologies of the End

Each century believing itself poised as if on the

edge of time.




2.
The Meaning of Impatience

Restlessness in time. To imagine that which is not

swiftly accomplished will never be fulfilled.


3.
Displaced Envy

Unable to initiate creation, or manage civilization:

the drive to engineer decreation with perfection.


4.
Perplexing Instincts

The division of the spirit between advancement and

abandon.


5.
The Attraction of the Apocalypse

To control with absolute certainty one thing. And

for it to be the last.


6.
Fragile Vector

The intersection where civilization and

perseverance meet.


{excerpt from the online poetry magazine, Agni}

[quasimodo1]

-The Whole False History of Human Beings-
There are gorgeous castles in France awkward and ponderous
To live in now, tho the owners who did live
In them were all famous and as modern as possible
Then, which meant fireplaces and a square hole in many walls
To lift food up to them or slide poop down, two different holes
On different sides of the cold damp rooms.
Ditto in England. In Ireland there were bigger castles, beautiful monsters,
And what we now think of as Germans wanted them.
These so-called Germans, actually Merovingians, lived in quonset
Huts of straw, branches, and, oh, a little adobe.
They were more warlike than the Nazis and nearly as
Foolish. Boiled dead on the Irish walls their first trip.
(They had many little boats to get there.)
(Numerous survivors of boiling were allowed to return to Merovingia to tell the tale
As a warning.) The tale got the German collective psychic blood boiling
And “naturally” they went back and this time the Irish,
Who were better cleverer viciouser fighters if you can imagine,
Chopped up all but a few, cleverly chopped up
The trunks of bodies besides the obvious appendages and nuts
And dicks, and only a few survivors were allowed
To return to Merovingia to tell the tale. The
Irish made them cast off from Ireland in their little boats
With bags of arms, heads, and the aforementioned creative carvings Of pieces of trunks together with bags of German or Merovingian genitals
But the Germans or Merovingians threw these in the deep sea
While returning to Germany where more collective blood boiled
And they were hysterically stirred up and vowed to do
Things I hesitate to mention here. So, right, they went back
And the Irish ate them all. ... {excerpt, from the Boston Review}

[quasimodo1]

Outsider Art
by Kay Ryan


Most of it’s too dreary
or too cherry red.
If it’s a chair, it’s
covered with things
the savior said
or should have said—
dense admonishments
in nail polish
too small to be read.
If it’s a picture,
the frame is either
burnt matches glued together
or a regular frame painted over
to extend the picture. There never
seems to be a surface equal
to the needs of these people. ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

NOTES FROM THE AIR

Selected Later Poems.

By John Ashbery.

364 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $34.95. -- Review entitled "But I Digress" written by Langdon Hammer, nytimes Sunday book review, 4/20/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/bo...2&oref=slogin#

[JBI]

Heart's Needle
by W. D. Snodgrass

For Cynthia

When Suibhe would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, "Your father is dead." "I'm sorry to hear it," he said. "Your mother is dead," said the lad. "All pity for me has gone out of the world." "Your sister, too, is dead." "The mild sun rests on every ditch," he said; "a sister loves even though not loved." "Suibhne, your daughter is dead." "And an only daughter is the needle of the heart." "And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you 'Daddy' he is dead." "Aye," said Suibhne, "that's the drop that brings a man to the ground."
He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.

—after The Middle-Irish Romance
The Madness of Suibhne

1

Child of my winter, born
When the new fallen soldiers froze
In Asia's steep ravines and fouled the snows,
When I was torn

By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind
To that cold war where, lost, I could not find
My peace in my will,

All those days we could keep
Your mind a landscape of new snow
Where the chilled tenant-farmer finds, below,
His fields asleep

In their smooth covering, white
As quilts to warm the resting bed
Of birth or pain, spotless as paper spread
For me to write,

continued here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15302

[quasimodo1]

Good to see you on this thread, JBI. Havn't thought about W.D.Snodgrass in years. Thanks for the link.q1

[quasimodo1]

Just Walking Around by John Ashbery


.....Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other. {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

Repulsive Theory



Little has been made
of the soft, skirting action
of magnets reversed,
while much has been
made of attraction.
But is it not this pillowy
principle of repulsion
that produces the
doily edges of oceans
or the arabesques of thought?
And do these cutout coasts
and incurved rhetorical beaches
not baffle the onslaught
of the sea or objectionable people
and give private life
what small protection it's got?
Praise then the oiled motions
of avoidance, the pearly
convolutions of all that
slides off or takes a
wide berth; praise every
eddying vacancy of Earth, ... {excerpt}

[quasimodo1]

John Colburn
BURNING UP

for Frank Stanford and for Nicaragua

Dawn came and there was something like a great

ear

behind the sun.

Ashes drifted down though nothing had burned.

I wanted to shine like a fish.

Supposedly there are people who

will not burn in a fire.

Biblical people.

I carried my bucket.

Dead men pumped water from

the center of the earth.

We all drank it.

More ashes arrived.

We caught them on our tongues,

angels of next time receiving the body.

The earth tumbled then,

the pump handle creaked.

When soldiers came, we ran.

Like always.

I did a snake dance into the culvert.

Soldiers were afraid of ghosts.

A tongue is like a fish worn dull,

shine gone.

Day after day pieces of wood

floated down the river.

What were they building down there, at the end?

They were building a cross.

They were building a bird to fly us out.

They were building a new city

for the dead to lead from

and the soldiers were blind to it.

By noon the ghosts were gone.

The pump handle creaked, but no water.

When the soldiers came back I changed.

I became an angel of next time.

I said the words and

scales fell from my fish tongue

but the giant ear was stone.

Soldiers drifted like ashes.

I told them:

Downriver, they are building

wings that will not burn in a fire

and you are right to hide.

Put down your guns.
-------------------------------------------------------{excerpt}

http://www.jubilat.org/n8/colburn.html

[quasimodo1]

Turtle
by Kay Ryan


..... Even being practical,
she's often stuck up to the axle on her way
to something edible. With everything optimal,
she skirts the ditch which would convert
her shell into a serving dish. She lives
below luck-level, never imagining some lottery
will change her load of pottery to wings.
Her only levity is patience,
the sport of truly chastened things. {excerpt}

[JBI]

from LONELINESS by Lee Ann Roripaugh

My father made me keep
the bright orange Sanka cans,
with holes in the lids
for ventilation, on
the back porch overnight.
But by morning, sunlight
had steeped my frogs
like tea bags, their bodies
hot to touch as I laid
them out under
the Nanking Cherry trees
and tried to revive them
with cold water
from the garden hose.
When my father took
them away to bury,
my mother asked me not
to cry. That night
was the Fourth of July,
and my mother and father
and I went up to the attic
to watch the fireworks,
each with a plate-sized
circle of watermelon.
continued here: http://www.usd.edu/engl/faculty/roripaugh.cfm

She seems stylistically traditional, but her foundation in the traditions and experiences of Japanese immigrants in America makes her a very interesting, and insightful poet.

[quasimodo1]

COMPLETE MINIMAL POEMS

By Aram Saroyan.

277 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse. Paper, $20.
Review entitled "Lighght Verse" by Richard Hell-----This book collects nearly all the poems Aram Saroyan wrote in the 1960s, when he was in his early 20s and, as he put it, “the only person available at a typewriter who didn’t have some predetermined use in mind for it.” The resulting pages, tapped in Aram Saroyan by his typewriter, were succinct. Saroyan was the master of the one-word poem. But his works were as musical and meaningful as more conventional poetry, too, and a lot more amusing. The minimal poems were eye openers, ear openers and mind openers, and no one else was doing anything much like them at the time, and no one has since. {Thanks to JBI for introducing Lee Ann Roripaugh, at least to this reader}





277 pp. Ugly Duckling Presse. Paper, $20.
"Granted — as Saroyan has — he was smoking a lot of grass at the time. But every second person in the United States was, and is, on something or other often enough. The grass factor is interesting because: 1) it’s typical of the era, always an interesting dimension of art; 2) one realizes it couldn’t be an unfair advantage, since no one else wrote like he did; and 3) the reader’s knowledge of it confers a nice extra little psychedelic ting to the pages." {April 27, 2008 nytimes book review section} http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/bo...2&oref=slogin#

[quasimodo1]

http://www.loc.gov/poetry/events.html

[quasimodo1]

In a Bottle


... (That lyre should be

Administered a serum! Every last lackluster mist,
Each lactose-lacking mother, can be fixed! No fear!) From human
City rooms a mush of doctorable suburb issues forth–degrees

In marrow-clog, amounts in mottlement. Kreme de la
Kreme! (Officially OK for all of us to be superlative, I’m pretty
Sure, as long as the kids take all their tele-tablets

And the wellness store takes spelling
From the FCC. It’s thanks to lawyers
We have settlements at all, of course,

And thanks to governors your class in governmentalese–it is
Required–and wired!–let’s give our nation’s CEO a great
Big hand! A chip for every memory loss and shoulder! No need

Ever to recollect, or be alone, or die. The message is
The middleman!) But now, beneath exclamatory notice
(although not the one duck’s jaundiced eye) three bugs in a bottle–

Their brains unwashed, their feelers fine–begin (with
Morseless expertise) to conjugate,
And multiply.----------------------------------------- http://www.drunkenboat.com/db3/mchugh/bottle.html