Piscator
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Amen brother, thank goodness for that. Thanks for sharing.
National (USA) Poetry Month
- Thread starter Tzara
- Start date
Tzara
Continental
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I've been trying to do several different things with my posts in this thread. First of all, simply come up with a poem each day from a different poet that I can say something (however brief) about. I've also tried to vary the kind of poem I talk about, both stylistically and in terms of other parameters like the author's gender or race, country of origin, sexual orientation, etc. All while trying to pick poems that are ones I have especially liked.
One parameter I haven't been at all good at is country of origin. So far, I've posted poems by U. A. Fanthorpe, who is British (or, as Annie might correct me, English) and William Butler Yeats (famously and flamboyantly Irish).
Today's poem reaches out of my normal comfort zone of North America and my occasional nod to Europe by posting a poem by Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) who was a significant Australian poet and, interestingly, librettist. I discovered her poetry through Wikipedia, of all places, because the Wikipedia article on the Onegin stanza, a fixed form that Angie and others have equated to a form of bodily torture but which is perhaps my favorite fixed form, mentions that Harwood employed the form in some of her poems.
See for yourself. The quoted poem is written in Onegin stanza. I'll explain things about the form later:
Sea Eagle
Gwen Harwood
Dusk, early springtime. Light's a tender
grey monotone, and silver-cold
water's a mirror where the slender
grasses in stony shallows hold
their shadows still. Twilight uncovers
old nightfall sorrows: friends and lovers
long lost, once beautiful. The hills
of Bruny darken. Darkness fills
thin ribs of water as the wading
herons stab at the edge of night.
Wingbeats: from a bare branch the white-
breasted sea eagle soars in fading
cloudlight. A late gleam from the west
catches him riding on a crest
of air to his untroubled gleaming
eminence. He turns and drifts,
his mile of quiet water seeming
a wingspan wide. How the heart lifts
from old hesperian sadness, follows
him homeward through the shadowy hollows
between the hills, accepting all:
the lordly hunter and the small
creatures who tremble at his rising.
Night voices wake as night comes on
and conjure when the last light's gone
the always known, always surprising
flight of the mind that soars to share
his pathway in cold shires of air.
Source: Collected Poems 1943-1995 (2003)
The basic Onegin stanza is a quasi-sonnet form in iambic tetrameter with a rhyme pattern of aBaB ccDD eFFe GG, with the lowercase letters indicating "feminine" rhymes (where the line ends on a two-syllable rhyme, with the stressed syllable the penultimate one—like tower and power). It is kind of an artifact from Russian poetry, which is a language in which these kind of endings are common.
Anyway, it's a difficult form to compose in in English. Most poets who have attempted it have used the lively meter and rhythmic variation of the feminine and masculine ends to write humorous or satirical verse. Which is what makes Harwood's poem stand out. It's lyric, and delicately so, though following the pattern of the form.
Harwood composed quite a number of poems in Onegin stanza, though the bulk of them seem to be "occasional" poems—i.e. poems written for dedications, honorary degrees, or other kinds of ceremonies. It is a form most often associated with humor.
Which she is, as well, though of a particularly sardonic kind. She moved as a young wife to Tasmania, where her husband was a professor at the university. I gather from reading about her (ishtat and todski, might elaborate on this) that this was the cultural equivalent of being sent to rural Oklahoma—in other words, nowheresville.
She wrote poems, but encountered a lot of rejections, so started writing and submitting poems under "male" names. In one famous incident, she had two sonnets accepted by the publication The Bulletin, both of which included acrostics that weren't noticed by the editors, the more notorious of which read: FUCK ALL EDITORS.
Well, that's a lot of me admiring her spirit. What I love about this poem in particular is that it manages to use a form that tends to be used for satire or mockery and turn it into something lyrical. The tone of the poem is gentle, the rhythms softened by Harwood's extensive use of enjambment. Because the lines sift the reader to the next line de-emphasizes the rhyme and the rhythm of the poem.
Which is, for me, quite lovely.
I love the form so much I wrote a paper about the Onegin form and quoted Harwood's poem. What's especially interesting about this example is how subtly she has rendered the shifts from feminine to masculine rhyme and back.
One parameter I haven't been at all good at is country of origin. So far, I've posted poems by U. A. Fanthorpe, who is British (or, as Annie might correct me, English) and William Butler Yeats (famously and flamboyantly Irish).
Today's poem reaches out of my normal comfort zone of North America and my occasional nod to Europe by posting a poem by Gwen Harwood (1920-1995) who was a significant Australian poet and, interestingly, librettist. I discovered her poetry through Wikipedia, of all places, because the Wikipedia article on the Onegin stanza, a fixed form that Angie and others have equated to a form of bodily torture but which is perhaps my favorite fixed form, mentions that Harwood employed the form in some of her poems.
See for yourself. The quoted poem is written in Onegin stanza. I'll explain things about the form later:
Sea Eagle
Gwen Harwood
Dusk, early springtime. Light's a tender
grey monotone, and silver-cold
water's a mirror where the slender
grasses in stony shallows hold
their shadows still. Twilight uncovers
old nightfall sorrows: friends and lovers
long lost, once beautiful. The hills
of Bruny darken. Darkness fills
thin ribs of water as the wading
herons stab at the edge of night.
Wingbeats: from a bare branch the white-
breasted sea eagle soars in fading
cloudlight. A late gleam from the west
catches him riding on a crest
of air to his untroubled gleaming
eminence. He turns and drifts,
his mile of quiet water seeming
a wingspan wide. How the heart lifts
from old hesperian sadness, follows
him homeward through the shadowy hollows
between the hills, accepting all:
the lordly hunter and the small
creatures who tremble at his rising.
Night voices wake as night comes on
and conjure when the last light's gone
the always known, always surprising
flight of the mind that soars to share
his pathway in cold shires of air.
Source: Collected Poems 1943-1995 (2003)
Anyway, it's a difficult form to compose in in English. Most poets who have attempted it have used the lively meter and rhythmic variation of the feminine and masculine ends to write humorous or satirical verse. Which is what makes Harwood's poem stand out. It's lyric, and delicately so, though following the pattern of the form.
Harwood composed quite a number of poems in Onegin stanza, though the bulk of them seem to be "occasional" poems—i.e. poems written for dedications, honorary degrees, or other kinds of ceremonies. It is a form most often associated with humor.
Which she is, as well, though of a particularly sardonic kind. She moved as a young wife to Tasmania, where her husband was a professor at the university. I gather from reading about her (ishtat and todski, might elaborate on this) that this was the cultural equivalent of being sent to rural Oklahoma—in other words, nowheresville.
She wrote poems, but encountered a lot of rejections, so started writing and submitting poems under "male" names. In one famous incident, she had two sonnets accepted by the publication The Bulletin, both of which included acrostics that weren't noticed by the editors, the more notorious of which read: FUCK ALL EDITORS.
Well, that's a lot of me admiring her spirit. What I love about this poem in particular is that it manages to use a form that tends to be used for satire or mockery and turn it into something lyrical. The tone of the poem is gentle, the rhythms softened by Harwood's extensive use of enjambment. Because the lines sift the reader to the next line de-emphasizes the rhyme and the rhythm of the poem.
Which is, for me, quite lovely.
I love the form so much I wrote a paper about the Onegin form and quoted Harwood's poem. What's especially interesting about this example is how subtly she has rendered the shifts from feminine to masculine rhyme and back.
Tzara
Continental
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Thanks, both of you. I sometimes feel that my posting to this thread is like masturbation—something personally gratifying which leaves me still feeling lonely.
Angeline
Poet Chick
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Thanks, both of you. I sometimes feel that my posting to this thread is like masturbation—something personally gratifying which leaves me still feeling lonely.
This is an excellent thread (your threads never disappoint, at least not from my perspective). You've introduced me to new poets and a few new styles of writing. I agree, for example, that the Wright poem is brilliant. I've seen list poems before, but your example is remarkably cohesive, sort of like a more connected modern ghazal...only sort of, but that was my take upon reading it.
Just keep on keeping on, my friend. Your ideas and their execution in poems and threads are inspiring to so many here, posters and lurkers alike.
Hell maybe I'll even try an Onegin stanza. I definitely like that form better than the dreaded you-know-what-tina. I can do fourteen lines. I bet I can even get the meter right...mostly.
Tzara
Continental
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I have a friend who likes to occasionally try her hand at Asian forms of poetry and who is particularly interested in haibun. Haibun is a kind of combination form, consisting of a prose poem followed by a shorter form, typically and classically a haiku. In addition, the prose portion is often a kind of journal entry, usually describing a travel location or something similar to that.
It's an interesting form to try out, and surprisingly difficult to even do badly, at least for me—I get hung up on the prose poem part and never get to the haiku (which is difficult enough to compose anyway, let alone as part of a combination form).
My selection for today is a recent haibun by the Pushcart Prize-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil:
Forsythe Avenue Haibun
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Only a few people and three alley cats remember when the house was gray, not yellow. A pair of empty swing sets at the schoolyard rock themselves to sleep for a late-afternoon nap. A blue dog used to trot on top of little ginkgo fans confettied on the sidewalk like he showed up too late to a parade. Farther down the avenue is a baby who seems to lose her pacifier each day around seven o’clock. Tulip bulbs that a girl once planted and sprinkled with pepper flakes have all been scratched up by brave squirrels who now strut the street with tiny blistered mouths. When they chew chickadee wing in their wet, hot mouths, the alley cats become accomplices. This is her legacy. Her footprints are everywhere:
every gate is her
red mouth on fire—birds want
to speak but cannot
Source: Oceanic (2018)
Is this a good haibun? I have no idea, but it does seem to fit Nezhukumatathil's own description of the form in which "[t]he haiku usually ends the poem as a sort of whispery and insightful postscript to the prose of the beginning of the poem" (see this article).
In any case, I've found them an interesting challenge to attempt to write and I find Ms. Nezhukumatathil's examples of the form and her article on haibun to provide excellent guidance for someone trying to write their own haibun.
To read something inspired by classical haibun, but in practice very different, see these examples by John Ashbery.
It's an interesting form to try out, and surprisingly difficult to even do badly, at least for me—I get hung up on the prose poem part and never get to the haiku (which is difficult enough to compose anyway, let alone as part of a combination form).
My selection for today is a recent haibun by the Pushcart Prize-winning poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil:
Forsythe Avenue Haibun
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Only a few people and three alley cats remember when the house was gray, not yellow. A pair of empty swing sets at the schoolyard rock themselves to sleep for a late-afternoon nap. A blue dog used to trot on top of little ginkgo fans confettied on the sidewalk like he showed up too late to a parade. Farther down the avenue is a baby who seems to lose her pacifier each day around seven o’clock. Tulip bulbs that a girl once planted and sprinkled with pepper flakes have all been scratched up by brave squirrels who now strut the street with tiny blistered mouths. When they chew chickadee wing in their wet, hot mouths, the alley cats become accomplices. This is her legacy. Her footprints are everywhere:
every gate is her
red mouth on fire—birds want
to speak but cannot
Source: Oceanic (2018)
In any case, I've found them an interesting challenge to attempt to write and I find Ms. Nezhukumatathil's examples of the form and her article on haibun to provide excellent guidance for someone trying to write their own haibun.
To read something inspired by classical haibun, but in practice very different, see these examples by John Ashbery.
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Tzara
Continental
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I'm sure you can execute a perfectly correct Onegin stanza, Ms. A. One on any subject you would care to write about. (It actually, because of the "time" (i.e. meter) changes, is potentially a good form to write about jazz.)Hell maybe I'll even try an Onegin stanza. I definitely like that form better than the dreaded you-know-what-tina. I can do fourteen lines. I bet I can even get the meter right...mostly.
But now you have me thinking about a sestina thread, of course. Not solely to tweak you (you do know there is a double sestina, don't you?
), but because you've reinvigorated my interest in a complicated form.Maybe when I finish with this one.
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Tzara
Continental
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Well, National Poetry Month is almost over, as is Jazz Appreciation Month, so I decided I'd better post another poem that had a connection to jazz.
I'd mentioned earlier that I had tried off and on to write a poem about the great jazz bass player Jaco Pastorius, without much success. I'd forgotten at the time that the poet Bruce Bond (who is also a professional classical and jazz guitarist) had written a pretty good one that I'd read a couple of years ago. Here it is:
The Last Days of Jaco Pastorius
Bruce Bond
Go back and hear Three Views of a Secret,
its little Florida of fog and whisper,
how the man inside it lies there, listening,
and underneath his bed a bass guitar,
a voice to pull the weather to the earth,
to root each chord in the netherworld
of chords—tough to resist, the gravity
of the open E, popped and ringing,
how it tugs them hem of sky's blue fabric
like a child. And a bold one at that.
Not merely the descent, the punch of smoke,
the dilated eye of the largest speaker.
There's authority to a note's decay,
to the shaded bell-tones rocking in their tower.
Each an elegy to the one before.
The world's greatest, he said, and they believed
to hear him wing it over a page of changes
as if there were wind in his instrument.
So easy to take the ground for granted,
to ignore the bones inside the body,
the solo idiom of nocturnal birds.
It was he who saw the future there,
who shamelessly plied the nickel frets
from the rosewood of a bass he borrowed.
Surely the soil had opened its box of bees.
Anything for the pitch of the moment,
for that liberal feel along the fingerboard,
the bead of his callus gliding on its string.
You would think his bass had swallowed someone,
and it had, the way a language wavered
in its throat, or an almost language, a moan
at times, there where loss begins to take
shape, to crown as something foreign, new.
Somehow that seemed closest to the life
to come, the one that grew small inside
the epithet, inside the legend, the god,
the lie that gripped him like a last coin.
If his myth gave way, it broke the way
a seal breaks on a fifth of Black Label.
Another draught to chase his lost sons,
lost wings, his stolen Fender, the days he lost
in the halls of Bellevue, stepping slow
to his Thorazine Waltz. Once he drummed
a solo on the coffin of a friend.
Death walked homelessly close beside him
those final nights sleeping on the b-ball
courts, the beaten leather in his arms.
Or throwing curses in the eyes of strangers.
Death was one such stranger, looking back
through the troubled gaze of a priest, a fan,
or the angry bouncer who took him down.
No accounting for the hope that suddenly
turned for the worse, the dream he would emerge
from the silence of his coma, an Orpheus
ascending the fretted ladder. Even then
as they pulled the plug and his breath went
still, his heart kept on. Three hours it beat
alone, going down the shaft, searching
for signs of life, for a bird
cage among the rubble, a flutter of ash.
Source: Peal (2009)
Pastorius is probably best known for his work with the jazz/fusion band Weather Report, but he made recordings with a variety of artists including, notably, Joni Mitchell (her album Hejira). Like Chet Baker, he had alcohol and drug problems; problems that were likely made worse by his bipolar disorder. Also like Baker, he died under difficult and depressing circumstances, in Jaco's case after fighting with a nightclub bouncer.
Bond is in some ways particularly suited to write about Pastorius, as he is a professional musician in addition to being a poet and college professor. In Bond's book Peal, which this poem is taken from, all of the poems have musical connections, either to specific compositions, specific musicians, or technical issues related to music.
For a sample of Jaco's typical sound, this solo from a Weather Report concert is illustrative. This recording of Three Views of a Secret is probably the one referred to in the poem, though I like this one better (Jaco on piano, with the great Toots Thielemans on harmonica).
I'd mentioned earlier that I had tried off and on to write a poem about the great jazz bass player Jaco Pastorius, without much success. I'd forgotten at the time that the poet Bruce Bond (who is also a professional classical and jazz guitarist) had written a pretty good one that I'd read a couple of years ago. Here it is:
The Last Days of Jaco Pastorius
Bruce Bond
Go back and hear Three Views of a Secret,
its little Florida of fog and whisper,
how the man inside it lies there, listening,
and underneath his bed a bass guitar,
a voice to pull the weather to the earth,
to root each chord in the netherworld
of chords—tough to resist, the gravity
of the open E, popped and ringing,
how it tugs them hem of sky's blue fabric
like a child. And a bold one at that.
Not merely the descent, the punch of smoke,
the dilated eye of the largest speaker.
There's authority to a note's decay,
to the shaded bell-tones rocking in their tower.
Each an elegy to the one before.
The world's greatest, he said, and they believed
to hear him wing it over a page of changes
as if there were wind in his instrument.
So easy to take the ground for granted,
to ignore the bones inside the body,
the solo idiom of nocturnal birds.
It was he who saw the future there,
who shamelessly plied the nickel frets
from the rosewood of a bass he borrowed.
Surely the soil had opened its box of bees.
Anything for the pitch of the moment,
for that liberal feel along the fingerboard,
the bead of his callus gliding on its string.
You would think his bass had swallowed someone,
and it had, the way a language wavered
in its throat, or an almost language, a moan
at times, there where loss begins to take
shape, to crown as something foreign, new.
Somehow that seemed closest to the life
to come, the one that grew small inside
the epithet, inside the legend, the god,
the lie that gripped him like a last coin.
If his myth gave way, it broke the way
a seal breaks on a fifth of Black Label.
Another draught to chase his lost sons,
lost wings, his stolen Fender, the days he lost
in the halls of Bellevue, stepping slow
to his Thorazine Waltz. Once he drummed
a solo on the coffin of a friend.
Death walked homelessly close beside him
those final nights sleeping on the b-ball
courts, the beaten leather in his arms.
Or throwing curses in the eyes of strangers.
Death was one such stranger, looking back
through the troubled gaze of a priest, a fan,
or the angry bouncer who took him down.
No accounting for the hope that suddenly
turned for the worse, the dream he would emerge
from the silence of his coma, an Orpheus
ascending the fretted ladder. Even then
as they pulled the plug and his breath went
still, his heart kept on. Three hours it beat
alone, going down the shaft, searching
for signs of life, for a bird
cage among the rubble, a flutter of ash.
Source: Peal (2009)
Bond is in some ways particularly suited to write about Pastorius, as he is a professional musician in addition to being a poet and college professor. In Bond's book Peal, which this poem is taken from, all of the poems have musical connections, either to specific compositions, specific musicians, or technical issues related to music.
For a sample of Jaco's typical sound, this solo from a Weather Report concert is illustrative. This recording of Three Views of a Secret is probably the one referred to in the poem, though I like this one better (Jaco on piano, with the great Toots Thielemans on harmonica).
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Angeline
Poet Chick
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- Mar 11, 2002
- Posts
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A Certain Slant of Sunlight
Ted Berrigan
In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
...... will be too; but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
...... buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941--
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.
From Selected Poems by Ted Berrigan, published by Penguin Poets. Copyright © 1994 by Alice Notley, Executrix of the Estate of Ted Berrigan. Reprinted by permission of Alice Notley. All rights reserved.
********************
Ted Berrigan was a central figure of the second generation of the New York school of poets, descended one could say from the first generation-- John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara being the most prominent members of that earlier group.
Berrigan did not have an especially long career as a poet. Like many of the artists presented here he had substance issues (primarily alcohol and pills) and died just shy of his 50th birthday in 1983, mainly from drinking and neglect. He's not as well known as some of his contemporaries and that is too bad because his work--including his writings about poetry--are still relevant imo.
I've talked about Frank O'Hara's influence on Berrigan, which is clearest in Ted's early poems especially with their lists and addresses, their "I do this, I do that" quality. The poem I've chosen to present here comes from late in his career, and that shows in its more reflective and cohesive quality.
The poem is about memory and loss, how something as seemingly insignificant as a slant of sunlight can conjure a photographic memory of a long ago moment that drifts from the past across time and places and ultimately sends the poet in search of what present-day comfort he can find. I should add that the poem was certainly inspired, in part, by Emily Dickinson's There's a certain Slant of Light.
Why do I love this poem? The themes of memory and loss resonate for me as do the East Coast sensibility and the sense of drift from place to place: the roots from which rootlessness grow.
I could say lots more about Berrigan, especially his modern reimagining of the sonnet, like this one, but I'll stop before you all fall asleep.
Ted Berrigan
In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
...... will be too; but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
...... buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941--
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.
From Selected Poems by Ted Berrigan, published by Penguin Poets. Copyright © 1994 by Alice Notley, Executrix of the Estate of Ted Berrigan. Reprinted by permission of Alice Notley. All rights reserved.
********************
Ted Berrigan was a central figure of the second generation of the New York school of poets, descended one could say from the first generation-- John Ashberry, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara being the most prominent members of that earlier group.
Berrigan did not have an especially long career as a poet. Like many of the artists presented here he had substance issues (primarily alcohol and pills) and died just shy of his 50th birthday in 1983, mainly from drinking and neglect. He's not as well known as some of his contemporaries and that is too bad because his work--including his writings about poetry--are still relevant imo.
I've talked about Frank O'Hara's influence on Berrigan, which is clearest in Ted's early poems especially with their lists and addresses, their "I do this, I do that" quality. The poem I've chosen to present here comes from late in his career, and that shows in its more reflective and cohesive quality.
The poem is about memory and loss, how something as seemingly insignificant as a slant of sunlight can conjure a photographic memory of a long ago moment that drifts from the past across time and places and ultimately sends the poet in search of what present-day comfort he can find. I should add that the poem was certainly inspired, in part, by Emily Dickinson's There's a certain Slant of Light.
Why do I love this poem? The themes of memory and loss resonate for me as do the East Coast sensibility and the sense of drift from place to place: the roots from which rootlessness grow.
I could say lots more about Berrigan, especially his modern reimagining of the sonnet, like this one, but I'll stop before you all fall asleep.
Tzara
Continental
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 7,609
My initial thought was, since I started this thread a week into April, to keep going a week after the end of the month, but I have changed my mind about that. I like writing these little intros and outros to poems I have found interesting, but they take time and I kind of feel I'd like to do something else with that time. Like maybe try to write a poem myself, for example.
Or resurrect it as a similar thread that didn't have the daily posting requirement.
Anyway. Since I've been posting poems I was interested in for various reasons, not all of which were that the poem in question was unquestionably excellent, I want to end with a poem I do think is "unquestionably excellent." It is, also in some sense, an ekphrastic poem which is another of my interests. And it is by a poet I was extremely skeptical about based on other things I had heard about her. She completely crushed me with this one:
Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt
Jorie Graham
Although what glitters
.........on the trees,
row after perfect row,
.........is merely
the injustice
.........of the world,
the chips on the bark of each
.........beech tree
catching the light, the sum
.........of these delays
is the beautiful, the human
.........beautiful,
body of flaws.
.........The dead
would give anything
.........I’m sure,
to step again onto
.........the leafrot,
into the avenue of mottled shadows,
.........the speckled
broken skins. The dead
.........in their sheer
open parenthesis, what they
.........wouldn’t give
for something to lean on
.........that won’t
give way. I think I
.........would weep
for the moral nature
.........of this world,
for right and wrong like pools
.........of shadow
and light you can step in
.........and out of
crossing this yellow beech forest,
.........this buchen-wald,
one autumn afternoon, late
.........in the twentieth
century, in hollow light,
.........in gaseous light. . . .
To receive the light
.........and return it
and stand in rows, anonymous,
.........is a sweet secret
even the air wishes
.........it could unlock.
See how it pokes at them
.........in little hooks,
the blue air, the yellow trees.
.........Why be afraid?
They say when Klimt
.........died suddenly
a painting, still
.........incomplete,
was found in his studio,
.........a woman’s body
open at its point of
.........entry,
rendered in graphic,
.........pornographic,
detail—something like
.........a scream
between her legs. Slowly,
.........feathery,
he had begun to paint
.........a delicate
garment (his trademark)
.........over this mouth
of her body. The mouth
.........of her face
is genteel, bored, feigning a need
.........for sleep. The fabric
defines the surface,
.........the story,
so we are drawn to it,
.........its blues
and yellows glittering
.........like a stand
of beech trees late
.........one afternoon
in Germany, in fall.
.........It is called
Buchenwald, it is
.........1890. In
the finished painting
.........the argument
has something to do
.........with pleasure.
Source: Erosion (1983)
Jorie Graham, former professor in the Iowa Writing Workshop, currently the Boylston professor at Harvard, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, is by any meaningful measure, a Big Deal in contemporary American poetry. That she would write this poem, with its critical reflections on art and the artist, is also understandable, as she is the daughter of sculptor Beverly Pepper and the wife of English professor turned poet turned visual artist Peter Sacks, whose art was profiled in a recent New Yorker article. So she knows something about both poetry and visual art.
Which, of course, doesn't say anything about this particular poem.
It starts out oddly, invoking "injustice" in the first stanza and then turning to "the dead" who "would give anything. . . to step again onto / the leafrot". It is not until the sixth stanza that Graham points out that Klimt's painting (painted, it is important to note, in 1902) is titled Buchenwald, a title that completely changes the reader's context (assuming they are aware of the WWII death camps).
Then, a couple of stanzas later, Graham abruptly shifts to comment on Klimt's last, unfinished, painting, and how one female figure is rendered "in graphic / pornographic, // detail—something like / a scream / between her legs" but that the artist was in the process of painting his characteristic ornamental dress over the body. (This is perhaps the painting referred to.)
Graham ends the poem thusly: "In // the finished painting / the argument / has something to do / with pleasure."
No, in fact, I can't give you a definitive explanation of what the poem means, or even what Graham intends you as reader to think about it. It is about surface beauty and underlying ugliness, perhaps, or how we as people refuse to recognize some of the awful things happening around us, preferring to see the "sanitized" public presentation of them.
It is probably much more profound than that, as I am not particularly gifted at reading nuance in literature.
Anyway. A great poem, I think.
Thank you all for your indulgence in letting me rattle on about poems I find interesting. One of the things I like about this place.
Or resurrect it as a similar thread that didn't have the daily posting requirement.
Anyway. Since I've been posting poems I was interested in for various reasons, not all of which were that the poem in question was unquestionably excellent, I want to end with a poem I do think is "unquestionably excellent." It is, also in some sense, an ekphrastic poem which is another of my interests. And it is by a poet I was extremely skeptical about based on other things I had heard about her. She completely crushed me with this one:
Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt
Jorie Graham
Although what glitters
.........on the trees,
row after perfect row,
.........is merely
the injustice
.........of the world,
the chips on the bark of each
.........beech tree
catching the light, the sum
.........of these delays
is the beautiful, the human
.........beautiful,
body of flaws.
.........The dead
would give anything
.........I’m sure,
to step again onto
.........the leafrot,
into the avenue of mottled shadows,
.........the speckled
broken skins. The dead
.........in their sheer
open parenthesis, what they
.........wouldn’t give
for something to lean on
.........that won’t
give way. I think I
.........would weep
for the moral nature
.........of this world,
for right and wrong like pools
.........of shadow
and light you can step in
.........and out of
crossing this yellow beech forest,
.........this buchen-wald,
one autumn afternoon, late
.........in the twentieth
century, in hollow light,
.........in gaseous light. . . .
To receive the light
.........and return it
and stand in rows, anonymous,
.........is a sweet secret
even the air wishes
.........it could unlock.
See how it pokes at them
.........in little hooks,
the blue air, the yellow trees.
.........Why be afraid?
They say when Klimt
.........died suddenly
a painting, still
.........incomplete,
was found in his studio,
.........a woman’s body
open at its point of
.........entry,
rendered in graphic,
.........pornographic,
detail—something like
.........a scream
between her legs. Slowly,
.........feathery,
he had begun to paint
.........a delicate
garment (his trademark)
.........over this mouth
of her body. The mouth
.........of her face
is genteel, bored, feigning a need
.........for sleep. The fabric
defines the surface,
.........the story,
so we are drawn to it,
.........its blues
and yellows glittering
.........like a stand
of beech trees late
.........one afternoon
in Germany, in fall.
.........It is called
Buchenwald, it is
.........1890. In
the finished painting
.........the argument
has something to do
.........with pleasure.
Source: Erosion (1983)
Which, of course, doesn't say anything about this particular poem.
It starts out oddly, invoking "injustice" in the first stanza and then turning to "the dead" who "would give anything. . . to step again onto / the leafrot". It is not until the sixth stanza that Graham points out that Klimt's painting (painted, it is important to note, in 1902) is titled Buchenwald, a title that completely changes the reader's context (assuming they are aware of the WWII death camps).
Then, a couple of stanzas later, Graham abruptly shifts to comment on Klimt's last, unfinished, painting, and how one female figure is rendered "in graphic / pornographic, // detail—something like / a scream / between her legs" but that the artist was in the process of painting his characteristic ornamental dress over the body. (This is perhaps the painting referred to.)
Graham ends the poem thusly: "In // the finished painting / the argument / has something to do / with pleasure."
No, in fact, I can't give you a definitive explanation of what the poem means, or even what Graham intends you as reader to think about it. It is about surface beauty and underlying ugliness, perhaps, or how we as people refuse to recognize some of the awful things happening around us, preferring to see the "sanitized" public presentation of them.
It is probably much more profound than that, as I am not particularly gifted at reading nuance in literature.
Anyway. A great poem, I think.
Thank you all for your indulgence in letting me rattle on about poems I find interesting. One of the things I like about this place.
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JCSTREET
Literotica Guru
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- Apr 12, 2004
- Posts
- 1,972
Great idea Tzara.
My first choice:
My Father’s Love Letters
by Yusef Komunyakaa
On Fridays he’d open a can of Jax
After coming home from the mill,
& ask me to write a letter to my mother
Who sent postcards of desert flowers
Taller than men. He would beg,
Promising to never beat her
Again. Somehow I was happy
She had gone, & sometimes wanted
To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou
Williams’ “Polka Dots & Moonbeams”
Never made the swelling go down.
His carpenter’s apron always bulged
With old nails, a claw hammer
Looped at his side & extension cords
Coiled around his feet.
Words rolled from under the pressure
Of my ballpoint: Love,
Baby, Honey, Please.
We sat in the quiet brutality
Of voltage meters & pipe threaders,
Lost between sentences . . .
The gleam of a five-pound wedge
On the concrete floor
Pulled a sunset
Through the doorway of his toolshed.
I wondered if she laughed
& held them over a gas burner.
My father could only sign
His name, but he’d look at blueprints
& say how many bricks
Formed each wall. This man,
Who stole roses & hyacinth
For his yard, would stand there
With eyes closed & fists balled,
Laboring over a simple word, almost
Redeemed by what he tried to say.
Reprinted from Bebitacomida
I apologise to those of you who have seen me discuss this poem before, but I really do love it. It is a great narrative, seen from a young person's perspective, someone old enough to write for his illiterate father. I'd guess someone in his teens who has complicated feelings about his absent mother and brutal father. I'm sure part of the appeal for me is the working-class milieu: I was raised in that world so it touches me.
Ultimately I think it's a poem about love and how it survives even in the most difficult situations. The father still loves the wife he beat and drove away: the son loves his father enough to recognize his abilities in spite of his illiteracy, brutality, maybe a drinking problem. The father gets lost in himself, trying to communicate. But the son also presses down hard when he writes and has little sympathy for the mother who, after all, left him. And yet he thinks about her, the music that she loved, what she might do with the letters. She is very present in the poem even though she is distant, among flowers "taller than men." All this comes across to the reader. The writing is vivid and evocative. It gives the reader so much and at the same time leaves much open to interpretation. Imo it is worth reading over and over to catch all the imagery and nuance.
It is a fine poem but it hits me too hard
Tzara
Continental
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Given that, as Guilty Pleasure reminds us in this thread, it's once again National Poetry Month (or International Poetry Month, whichever) I thought I would restart my post-a-poem-and-comment celebration from last year. The instructions/details for participation are here, if any of you want to join in. I intend to post something new each day in April, but I'm not going to feel bad if I skip a day and none of you should feel guilty if you skip one, a few, most, or all of the days. But since many of us are pretty much stuck at home, maybe you could spend a few minutes telling us about a poem you especially like.
Anyway, have fun and stay safe.
Anyway, have fun and stay safe.
Tzara
Continental
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One of the first contemporary poets I latched on to as someone whose work I really liked was Kim Addonizio, particularly because she writes some of the best erotic poems I've read. She has, predictably, taken some flak for that and for some of her personal qualities: she flaunts her tattoos, dresses more like a rock musician than a college professor, and is upfront in many of her poems about hanging out in bars and drinking a lot. One awards committee member sneeringly referred to her as "Bukowski in a sundress," which she later adopted as the title of her memoir.
Anyway, this poem is one of my favorites of hers. It's from her first collection, The Philosopher's Club:
She's a good short story writer, too. Check her out.
Anyway, this poem is one of my favorites of hers. It's from her first collection, The Philosopher's Club:
Alone in Your House
Kim Addonizio
I walk naked and
dripping to the kitchen,
the floor sticky,
rubbing myself
with your damp towel.
When I go out on the porch
two fawns get up
from the grass.
We have surprised each other;
their soft black noses
swing away from my breasts,
quivering.
I remember you nuzzling me,
raising my hips,
my cheek against the mattress buttons.
The little deer
have been at the berries,
nibbling stems. The doe eases out
from the bushes,
juice streaking her flanks.
They follow her away down the hill
and the wet
flattened grass
slowly rises behind them.
Source: The Philosopher's Club (1994)
This poem does a good job of illustrating some of the qualities I think make for a good erotic poem--vivid imagery, simple language (there are only two words in the poem with more than two syllables), the lack of explicit language or explicit content (the erotic incident precedes the time frame of the poem). I especially like the implied allusion tying the two fawns' observation of the narrator's breasts to Song of Solomon 4:5 (Your breasts are like two fawns, like twin fawns of a gazelle that browse among the lilies. NIV). The wonderful central image (I remember you nuzzling me, / raising my hips, // my cheek against the mattress buttons) I find so darned sexy it's like a punch in the gut (or a, um, somewhat similar location).Kim Addonizio
I walk naked and
dripping to the kitchen,
the floor sticky,
rubbing myself
with your damp towel.
When I go out on the porch
two fawns get up
from the grass.
We have surprised each other;
their soft black noses
swing away from my breasts,
quivering.
I remember you nuzzling me,
raising my hips,
my cheek against the mattress buttons.
The little deer
have been at the berries,
nibbling stems. The doe eases out
from the bushes,
juice streaking her flanks.
They follow her away down the hill
and the wet
flattened grass
slowly rises behind them.
Source: The Philosopher's Club (1994)
She's a good short story writer, too. Check her out.
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Piscator
Literotica Guru
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- May 30, 2003
- Posts
- 1,890
"April is the cruelest month"
The covid-19 crisis, brought me back to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, perhaps the preeminent English language poem of the last century. A dark poem for dark times, with the Spanish Flu following on the heels the War to End All Wars but it still speaks to me today.
I'll not copy it here but have linked it to a reading by Sir Alex Guinness and if you have a spare 25 minutes in your self distanced world definitely worth a listen.
The covid-19 crisis, brought me back to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, perhaps the preeminent English language poem of the last century. A dark poem for dark times, with the Spanish Flu following on the heels the War to End All Wars but it still speaks to me today.
I'll not copy it here but have linked it to a reading by Sir Alex Guinness and if you have a spare 25 minutes in your self distanced world definitely worth a listen.
Piscator
Literotica Guru
- Joined
- May 30, 2003
- Posts
- 1,890
Like many English Canadian parents who raised our children in the 80's and 90's, Dennis Lee's Alligator Pie was in the upper tier of bedtime reading. South of the border, you might remember Dennis for writing the lyrics for Fragile Rock songs, and one albums "Jim Henson's Muppets present Fraggle Rock," won a Grammy Award.
But Dennis was and is much more than that, he co-founded a significant independent Canadian publishing house, was Toronto's Poet Laureate and is hailed as "Canada's most important - and most astoundingly diverse -living poet.
I've cherry picked one of his poem, which definitely fits well into Literotica.
Coming Becomes You
Dennis Lee
From: Nightwatch: New & Selected Poems 1968-1996. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Coming be-
comes you,
little one:
rockabye world as you lie, and the great pang takes you in
waves. Coming
becomes you.
With horses you come, with arabian
slather with jugular grunts and in
fretwork, in fistfuls, on Fridays we come in the
danger and midnight of horses.
Coming you come like a spill, like a
spell, like a spoonful of flesh in the
roaring, high on blood
ocean, come with your horses, you come to be played.
In after-
come, you nuzzle;
you nestle and noodle and nest.
And the ghosts in your eyes
do their long-legged, chaste parade.
Each time such sadness
hushes me: slow
ache in your gaze—nostalgia for
now, for now as it
goes away. You're
beautiful, small
queen of the pillow drowse, and
rockabye world in my arms.
Coming becomes you.
But Dennis was and is much more than that, he co-founded a significant independent Canadian publishing house, was Toronto's Poet Laureate and is hailed as "Canada's most important - and most astoundingly diverse -living poet.
I've cherry picked one of his poem, which definitely fits well into Literotica.
Coming Becomes You
Dennis Lee
From: Nightwatch: New & Selected Poems 1968-1996. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1996.
Coming be-
comes you,
little one:
rockabye world as you lie, and the great pang takes you in
waves. Coming
becomes you.
With horses you come, with arabian
slather with jugular grunts and in
fretwork, in fistfuls, on Fridays we come in the
danger and midnight of horses.
Coming you come like a spill, like a
spell, like a spoonful of flesh in the
roaring, high on blood
ocean, come with your horses, you come to be played.
In after-
come, you nuzzle;
you nestle and noodle and nest.
And the ghosts in your eyes
do their long-legged, chaste parade.
Each time such sadness
hushes me: slow
ache in your gaze—nostalgia for
now, for now as it
goes away. You're
beautiful, small
queen of the pillow drowse, and
rockabye world in my arms.
Coming becomes you.
Tzara
Continental
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 7,609
I buy a lot of books and, in particular, I buy a lot of remaindered books (i.e. books that have been sold for a very low rate by the publisher because they are discontinuing the title, printing a new edition, changing the price, etc.). Remaindered books usually sell for something like half the price of the original book, so I feel like I can experiment a bit in what I buy. It's a way for me to try authors I would not normally have read.
James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies is such a book. I picked it up at Powell's City of Books in Portland (now shuttered and I have my fingers crossed that they'll make it through the coronavirus shutdown OK) mainly, I think, because I loved the title. White is, in my opinion, something of an uneven writer, but when he is on, he is very, very good, as in this poem:
Mark Doty, in his introduction to the 2010 reprint edition (the one I own), talks about how unusual it is for a poem about masturbation written by a man to treat the subject with such emotional depth, rather than as simple physical relief. For me, it's what makes this such a memorable poem.
James L. White's The Salt Ecstasies is such a book. I picked it up at Powell's City of Books in Portland (now shuttered and I have my fingers crossed that they'll make it through the coronavirus shutdown OK) mainly, I think, because I loved the title. White is, in my opinion, something of an uneven writer, but when he is on, he is very, very good, as in this poem:
Making Love to Myself
James L. White
When I do it, I remember how it was with us.
Then my hands remember too,
and you're with me again, just the way it was.
After work when you'd come in and
turn the TV off and sit on the edge of the bed,
filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls,
trying not to wake me which you always did.
I'd breathe out long and say,
'Hi Jess, you tired baby?'
You'd say not so bad and rub my belly,
not after me really, just being sweet,
and I always thought I'd die a little
because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke.
We were poor as Job's turkey but we lived well—
the food, a few good movies, good dope, lots of talk,
lots of you and me trying on each other's skin.
What a sweet gift this is,
done with my memory, my cock and hands.
Sometimes I'd wake up wondering if I should fix
coffee for us before work,
almost thinking you're here again, almost seeing
your work jacket on the chair.
I wonder if you remember what
we promised when you took the job in Laramie?
Our way of staying with each other.
We promised there'd always be times
when the sky was perfectly lucid,
that we could remember each other through that.
You could remember me at my worktable
or in the all-night diners,
though we'd never call or write.
I just have to stop here Jess.
I just have to stop.
Source: The Salt Ecstasies (1982; 2010)
One of the topics we sometimes argue about here at Lit is what makes a poem an erotic poem. I think White's poem is a great example of an erotic poem that isn't "erotic" (i.e. sexually arousing). It's clearly about a sexual situation (masturbation) but frames it in terms of the emotional response the act evokes in the narrator. Perhaps if I was gay, I might find it sexually arousing, but I doubt it. But I do identify with the feelings of loss, both of a sexual partner and more importantly of an emotional partner, that the narrator expresses. As in the Addonizio poem I talked about yesterday, the language is simple and direct, and the imagery is extremely vivid (filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls). And, as with the Addonizio poem, the central image (What a sweet gift this is, / done with my memory, my cock and hands) is both startlingly clear and, yet, tender.James L. White
When I do it, I remember how it was with us.
Then my hands remember too,
and you're with me again, just the way it was.
After work when you'd come in and
turn the TV off and sit on the edge of the bed,
filling the room with gasoline smell from your overalls,
trying not to wake me which you always did.
I'd breathe out long and say,
'Hi Jess, you tired baby?'
You'd say not so bad and rub my belly,
not after me really, just being sweet,
and I always thought I'd die a little
because you smelt like burnt leaves or woodsmoke.
We were poor as Job's turkey but we lived well—
the food, a few good movies, good dope, lots of talk,
lots of you and me trying on each other's skin.
What a sweet gift this is,
done with my memory, my cock and hands.
Sometimes I'd wake up wondering if I should fix
coffee for us before work,
almost thinking you're here again, almost seeing
your work jacket on the chair.
I wonder if you remember what
we promised when you took the job in Laramie?
Our way of staying with each other.
We promised there'd always be times
when the sky was perfectly lucid,
that we could remember each other through that.
You could remember me at my worktable
or in the all-night diners,
though we'd never call or write.
I just have to stop here Jess.
I just have to stop.
Source: The Salt Ecstasies (1982; 2010)
Mark Doty, in his introduction to the 2010 reprint edition (the one I own), talks about how unusual it is for a poem about masturbation written by a man to treat the subject with such emotional depth, rather than as simple physical relief. For me, it's what makes this such a memorable poem.
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Tzara
Continental
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- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 7,609
I thought today I would post a poem by a local (i.e. Seattle) poet who, if anything, is much better known for writing books about pies--as in how to bake them. This is from an anthology of Seattle poets published by Ooligan Press, a small trade publisher associated with Portland State University.
Which is what I like about writing it.
A Poem by Brian McGuigan
Kate Lebo
My mother wanted to name me hardworking peasant.
Grandma said no. How about a good Irish name?
A roughhousing round earth name, she said.
My mother wanted to name me Fuck you, man.
Or Remington. But Grandma said no.
I was like two dogs at the park.
I pounced on one hand, bit myself
and bled like crazy. Often
I tell people I'm in a gang
but it's just me.
My skin is a secret shade
of dirt. My cat had more eyes
than teeth, pulled grass the dog
pissed on, did not allow holding.
My mother wanted boys
to have vaginas.
Poetry is the opposite of giving my mother
what she wants.
No holding is a rotten rule.
Fuck you, man.
My mother named me Tammy.
Call me hardworking. Call me
Brian. Hold me
to it. My name
means the earth is round.
Source: Seattle: Alive at the Center, ed. by Walker, Horowitz, anf Flenniken (2013)
I love how this poem starts out weird from the title onward. Brian McGuigan is another Seattle poet and Lebo apparently wrote this while taking a workshop with McGuigan, not that explains anything, thank God. The way the poem wanders about with its somewhat disconnected images mimics, or perhaps parodies, a certain kind of stream-of-consciousness poem I associate with the Beats or the New York School. (Or McGuigan, based on some of the poems by him I've read.) I guess I like the poem because it reminds me that poetry is (or at least can be) fun.Kate Lebo
My mother wanted to name me hardworking peasant.
Grandma said no. How about a good Irish name?
A roughhousing round earth name, she said.
My mother wanted to name me Fuck you, man.
Or Remington. But Grandma said no.
I was like two dogs at the park.
I pounced on one hand, bit myself
and bled like crazy. Often
I tell people I'm in a gang
but it's just me.
My skin is a secret shade
of dirt. My cat had more eyes
than teeth, pulled grass the dog
pissed on, did not allow holding.
My mother wanted boys
to have vaginas.
Poetry is the opposite of giving my mother
what she wants.
No holding is a rotten rule.
Fuck you, man.
My mother named me Tammy.
Call me hardworking. Call me
Brian. Hold me
to it. My name
means the earth is round.
Source: Seattle: Alive at the Center, ed. by Walker, Horowitz, anf Flenniken (2013)
Which is what I like about writing it.
AmericanTrash
Really Experienced
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- 259
Thank you.
Tzara
Continental
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 7,609
I'm tired today, having spent most of the morning and afternoon working on an essay exam for my philosophical psychology class. Also, it's Saturday, and most Saturdays I spend time wandering around some or another bookstore, not because I'm particularly looking for something to read, but just because I like to wander around in bookstores.
Obviously I can't do that now.
So here's another poem by a PNW writer--a poem about books, though specifically about libraries rather than bookstores. I guess I love my libraries too (which are also closed).
John Straley is, like Kate Lebo, better known for another type of writing. In his case, mystery novels. I'd highly recommend his Cecil Younger series, if you're looking for something to read during the semidemiquarantine we're all living under. Start with The Woman Who Married a Bear and move forward.
Though he has lived for many years in Alaska, he previously lived in Seattle and graduated from the University of Washington, so I think of him as local:
I particularly love the line "No wonder we learn to flirt in the library," though in our case, it meant each other's living rooms.
Obviously I can't do that now.
So here's another poem by a PNW writer--a poem about books, though specifically about libraries rather than bookstores. I guess I love my libraries too (which are also closed).
John Straley is, like Kate Lebo, better known for another type of writing. In his case, mystery novels. I'd highly recommend his Cecil Younger series, if you're looking for something to read during the semidemiquarantine we're all living under. Start with The Woman Who Married a Bear and move forward.
Though he has lived for many years in Alaska, he previously lived in Seattle and graduated from the University of Washington, so I think of him as local:
The Erotic Life of Books
John Straley
Did you know that inside a computer
there is no such thing as touch?
There are endless numbers and codes;
the "yes" "no"s of almost everything
we can possibly imagine,
but no real rubbing together.
Books in the library though,
touch one another
They lean there in orderly
yet lovely, uneven rows
with well-thumbed covers
snuggled tight.
Take one out too fast and you can hear
a sighing.
You can smell their breath
back in the stacks,
those old books, musty and unread
waiting next to the glossy bestsellers.
They smell like leather
and dust, those old ones,
and when you open one
you can hear a soft moan,
"Thank you," they say.
No wonder we learn to flirt in the library.
Walking with a fingertip down their spines:
Herodotus and Heaney and Hirshfield and Hogan,
the bodies of their work right here
under the skin.
We go to the back
past row after row of books,
a hundred million actual words
there, between sheets
bound in leather, and linen
and old thick cardboard worn to velvet.
We slip a note to the stranger,
reading in the last carrel
right up to closing time.
"I am really here," the note says,
"I have proof."
Source: The Rising and the Rain (2008)
I had debated posting a different, more personal poem by Straley, but I'm really missing walking around in bookstores today, so I picked this one. I've been very lucky in my personal life in that my wife also loves books and, especially, loves to own books. We're constantly running out of space to shelve them (though since she switched to mostly electronic books, it's really now only me overwhelming the house with volumes).John Straley
Did you know that inside a computer
there is no such thing as touch?
There are endless numbers and codes;
the "yes" "no"s of almost everything
we can possibly imagine,
but no real rubbing together.
Books in the library though,
touch one another
They lean there in orderly
yet lovely, uneven rows
with well-thumbed covers
snuggled tight.
Take one out too fast and you can hear
a sighing.
You can smell their breath
back in the stacks,
those old books, musty and unread
waiting next to the glossy bestsellers.
They smell like leather
and dust, those old ones,
and when you open one
you can hear a soft moan,
"Thank you," they say.
No wonder we learn to flirt in the library.
Walking with a fingertip down their spines:
Herodotus and Heaney and Hirshfield and Hogan,
the bodies of their work right here
under the skin.
We go to the back
past row after row of books,
a hundred million actual words
there, between sheets
bound in leather, and linen
and old thick cardboard worn to velvet.
We slip a note to the stranger,
reading in the last carrel
right up to closing time.
"I am really here," the note says,
"I have proof."
Source: The Rising and the Rain (2008)
I particularly love the line "No wonder we learn to flirt in the library," though in our case, it meant each other's living rooms.
Angeline
Poet Chick
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- Mar 11, 2002
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Tzara, I love your 2020 iteration of National Poetry Month. All your choices thus far have been wonderful to read. I especially like Wright's Making Love to Myself .
Also though I, like your wife, read mostly via the digital cloud these days, I love the sensory pleasures of books, especially old ones. They're more real than some people to me.
So thank you, yet again, for the poetry you bring to my world.
Also though I, like your wife, read mostly via the digital cloud these days, I love the sensory pleasures of books, especially old ones. They're more real than some people to me.
So thank you, yet again, for the poetry you bring to my world.
Tzara
Continental
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Well, thank you as well. I enjoy writing these little blurbs.Tzara, I love your 2020 iteration of National Poetry Month. All your choices thus far have been wonderful to read. I especially like Wright's Making Love to Myself .
Also though I, like your wife, read mostly via the digital cloud these days, I love the sensory pleasures of books, especially old ones. They're more real than some people to me.
So thank you, yet again, for the poetry you bring to my world.
Tzara
Continental
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- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
- 7,609
I hadn't intended to post a poem this month by an author I posted to this thread last year, but I came across this one in a book I was reading (another remaindered copy from Powell's in Portland) and it really struck me as speaking to some things I've been thinking about recently—especially how we tend to isolate ourselves from people who seem different from us in how they look, what language they speak (or the accent they have in speaking the same language), how they dress, who or what they support politically, what religion (or lack of one) they profess.
Plus, it's kind of a fun poem for people interested in words:
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the word she actually did use is basically a made-up synonym for the disease of silicosis, at least according to Wikipedia.
In any case, I like Ms. Nezhukumatathil's poems in general and this one especially.
Plus, it's kind of a fun poem for people interested in words:
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
............................The fear of long words
On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students, Don’t be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule
is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can’t help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels
to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor. You want something
to startle you? Try tapping the ball
of roots of a potted tomato plant
into your cupped hand one spring, only
to find a small black toad who kicks
and blinks his cold eye at you,
the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the X-rays
for your teeth or lung. Pray for no
dark spots. You may have
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:
coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders tiptoeing
across your face while you sleep on a sweet, fat couch.
But don’t be afraid of me, my last name, what language
I speak or what accent dulls itself on my molars.
I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam
of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will
lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full of tiny
dinoflagellates oozing green light when disturbed.
I promise dark gatherings of toadfish and comical shrimp
just when you think you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.
Source: At the Drive-In Volcano (2007)
After three days of concentrated, hard work I finally finished my exam, so I was looking for something a little bit lighter to post, though I think this poem has an edge to it as well. There's an earlier version posted at Slate and it's interesting to compare the two. The line breaks are somewhat different, though the words are largely the same with the exception of the long word for coal lung disease. The word in the earlier version, pneumonoultromononucleosis is not only considerably shorter than the one used in the book version of the poem, it's not a word I find a reference to on Google, which makes me wonder if she either made it up or misremembered the longer word.Aimee Nezhukumatathil
............................The fear of long words
On the first day of classes, I secretly beg
my students, Don’t be afraid of me. I know
my last name on your semester schedule
is chopped off or probably misspelled—
or both. I can’t help it. I know the panic
of too many consonants rubbed up
against each other, no room for vowels
to fan some air into the room of a box
marked Instructor. You want something
to startle you? Try tapping the ball
of roots of a potted tomato plant
into your cupped hand one spring, only
to find a small black toad who kicks
and blinks his cold eye at you,
the sun, a gnat. Be afraid of the X-rays
for your teeth or lung. Pray for no
dark spots. You may have
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis:
coal lung. Be afraid of money spiders tiptoeing
across your face while you sleep on a sweet, fat couch.
But don’t be afraid of me, my last name, what language
I speak or what accent dulls itself on my molars.
I will tell jokes, help you see the gleam
of the beak of a mohawked cockatiel. I will
lecture on luminescent sweeps of ocean, full of tiny
dinoflagellates oozing green light when disturbed.
I promise dark gatherings of toadfish and comical shrimp
just when you think you are alone, hoping to stay somehow afloat.
Source: At the Drive-In Volcano (2007)
Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, the word she actually did use is basically a made-up synonym for the disease of silicosis, at least according to Wikipedia.
In any case, I like Ms. Nezhukumatathil's poems in general and this one especially.
Tzara
Continental
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- Aug 2, 2005
- Posts
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As many of you know, I have a soft spot (some might say a soft head) for form poetry, especially for those forms considered the more difficult ones. As Angie would be happy to tell you, the sestina is one of those difficult forms--one she considers anathema--generally credited to the the Provençal poet and troubadour, Arnaut Daniel. A standard sestina (there are double and even triple sestinas for the truly disturbed) is 39 lines long, consisting of six sestets (six-line stanzas) and a three-line envoi. The cool part is that each line of each of the sestets ends with one of six words that repeat in the following sestets according to a particular pattern; in the envoi the same six words appear in a fixed pattern as well, though two to a line. The specific order of the end words can be found here
One of the main problems with writing a sestina, at least one that isn't completely sucky, is to find a way to keep repeating the end words without becoming forced or boring. A. E. Stallings, a poet whom I much admire, solves the problem by using and reusing a the same word--one that gets inserted into conversation not so much for semantics but for pacing:
While Stallings' poem has something of the same joke-like quality, it is also, I think, something of a plea or wake-up call for us to pay attention to how we speak (or, for that matter, write).
Anyway, kind of a fun poem for today, which is beautiful and even almost warm here in Amazonia.
Be well, all.
One of the main problems with writing a sestina, at least one that isn't completely sucky, is to find a way to keep repeating the end words without becoming forced or boring. A. E. Stallings, a poet whom I much admire, solves the problem by using and reusing a the same word--one that gets inserted into conversation not so much for semantics but for pacing:
Sestina: Like
A. E. Stallings
With a nod to Jonah Winter
Now we’re all "friends," there is no love but Like,
A semi-demi goddess, something like
A reality-TV star look-alike,
Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
In order to be liked. It isn’t like
There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain "dislike"
Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like
Is something you can quantify: each "like"
You gather’s almost something money-like,
Token of virtual support. "Please like
This page to stamp out hunger." And you’d like
To end hunger and climate change alike,
But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like
Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-
Wise props up scarecrow silences. "I’m like,
So OVER him," I overhear. "But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE
Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... "
Take "like" out of our chat, we’d all alike
Flounder, agape, gesticulating like
A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like
Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike
With other crutches, um, when we use "like,"
We’re not just buying time on credit: Like
Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,
Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click "like"
If you’re against extinction!) Like is like
Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like
Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike
Redundant fast food franchises, each like
(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike
Inversions, archaisms, who just like
Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t "like"
Their (literally) every other word? I’d like
Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.
But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,
How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.
Source: Like: Poems (2018)
The Jonah Winter reference is to Winter's "Sestina: Bob," which uses "Bob" as the obsessional end word throughout the poem and which is kind of manically hilarious.A. E. Stallings
With a nod to Jonah Winter
Now we’re all "friends," there is no love but Like,
A semi-demi goddess, something like
A reality-TV star look-alike,
Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
In order to be liked. It isn’t like
There’s Love or Hate now. Even plain "dislike"
Is frowned on: there’s no button for it. Like
Is something you can quantify: each "like"
You gather’s almost something money-like,
Token of virtual support. "Please like
This page to stamp out hunger." And you’d like
To end hunger and climate change alike,
But it’s unlikely Like does diddly. Like
Just twiddles its unopposing thumbs-ups, like-
Wise props up scarecrow silences. "I’m like,
So OVER him," I overhear. "But, like,
He doesn’t get it. Like, you know? He’s like
It’s all OK. Like I don’t even LIKE
Him anymore. Whatever. I’m all like ... "
Take "like" out of our chat, we’d all alike
Flounder, agape, gesticulating like
A foreign film sans subtitles, fall like
Dumb phones to mooted desuetude. Unlike
With other crutches, um, when we use "like,"
We’re not just buying time on credit: Like
Displaces other words; crowds, cuckoo-like,
Endangered hatchlings from the nest. (Click "like"
If you’re against extinction!) Like is like
Invasive zebra mussels, or it’s like
Those nutria-things, or kudzu, or belike
Redundant fast food franchises, each like
(More like) the next. Those poets who dislike
Inversions, archaisms, who just like
Plain English as she’s spoke — why isn’t "like"
Their (literally) every other word? I’d like
Us just to admit that’s what real speech is like.
But as you like, my friend. Yes, we’re alike,
How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.
Source: Like: Poems (2018)
While Stallings' poem has something of the same joke-like quality, it is also, I think, something of a plea or wake-up call for us to pay attention to how we speak (or, for that matter, write).
Anyway, kind of a fun poem for today, which is beautiful and even almost warm here in Amazonia.
Be well, all.
Angeline
Poet Chick
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- Mar 11, 2002
- Posts
- 27,055
I like it.
It reminded me of a Billy Collins haiku (ish) poem that showcased the vernacular "like" (e.g., she said like and I was like...). Alas I could not find it. Y'all would have liked it.
Tzara
Continental
- Joined
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- Posts
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Like everyone, I have my up days and my down days. Every once in a while, I get stuck in down mode and, unfortunately, that can sometimes last for quite some time. I think in my case it comes from being essentially an introvert and a pessimist, though I'm often quite a cheerful pessimist. The introversion thing, though, is always there.
I came across this poem while noodling around in my collection of poetry books. I probably bought it because it's a really attractively put together book, but it may have been because it was the winner of a competition judged by Dana Levin, who is a wonderful poet and someone one of my former teachers pressed me to read. As good a reason as any to pick up a book, I suppose.
The title is a Latin expression meaning "of sound mind." It is probably encountered more frequently in its negation, non compos mentis (of unsound mind), which appears in legal proceedings. Here's the poem:
The ending line is excellent--not only a great close to the preceding stream of consciousness, but a wonderfully evocative (and hopeful!) line on its own.
I came across this poem while noodling around in my collection of poetry books. I probably bought it because it's a really attractively put together book, but it may have been because it was the winner of a competition judged by Dana Levin, who is a wonderful poet and someone one of my former teachers pressed me to read. As good a reason as any to pick up a book, I suppose.
The title is a Latin expression meaning "of sound mind." It is probably encountered more frequently in its negation, non compos mentis (of unsound mind), which appears in legal proceedings. Here's the poem:
Compos Mentis
Jennifer Willoughby
You remember how to pick a lock.
Forget the door. It is a representation
of metaphysical laziness. What excites
you is the tumblers' chuck chuck chuck.
When driven by an external source of
energy, the universe dissipates that energy
efficiently. No disrespect to the universe,
but there are too many rabbits. Too bad
you are the rabbit-keeper. Step aside,
there is a rabbit! He's fine right where he
is, but you? Your external source is not
energy. Your specific sadness is bringing
everyone down. Jupiter's huge gravity
helped save baby Earth. A rabbit running
in circles is actually thinking strategically.
Nothing is as random as they say it is.
You are born the weirdo that you are.
Source: Beautiful Zero (2015)
As with the Kate Lebo poem I posted a couple of days ago, I like how the narrative wanders about from image to image, in this poem kind of how an obsessive person chains from thought to thought to thought in the manner of someone hyperlinking their way through unrelated Wikipedia articles. Reading a bit about the author, I found that she was under psychiatric care in her 20s (she's 50 now), being dosed with various psychoactive medications, which makes the title even more associative than it might otherwise be.Jennifer Willoughby
You remember how to pick a lock.
Forget the door. It is a representation
of metaphysical laziness. What excites
you is the tumblers' chuck chuck chuck.
When driven by an external source of
energy, the universe dissipates that energy
efficiently. No disrespect to the universe,
but there are too many rabbits. Too bad
you are the rabbit-keeper. Step aside,
there is a rabbit! He's fine right where he
is, but you? Your external source is not
energy. Your specific sadness is bringing
everyone down. Jupiter's huge gravity
helped save baby Earth. A rabbit running
in circles is actually thinking strategically.
Nothing is as random as they say it is.
You are born the weirdo that you are.
Source: Beautiful Zero (2015)
The ending line is excellent--not only a great close to the preceding stream of consciousness, but a wonderfully evocative (and hopeful!) line on its own.
