National (USA) Poetry Month

[Tzara]

OK. Yesterday's poem was a cropped villanelle in anapestic meter. My poem for today is one that is, if anything, even more of an oddity—one composed in counted verse. What is counted verse? Paul Hoover comments: "Counted verse operates by the number of words rather than the number of syllables and stresses to the line. It is not primarily syllabic and accentual, though it obviously has those features. As Dana Gioia suggested in conversation, it reminds us that here are two kinds of lines, the visual and the aural. Often the appearance of a poem on the page is the first information we have of it." This example is from May Swenson's 1967 collection "Half Sun Half Sleep."

Four-Word Lines
May Swenson

Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees'
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I'm a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees' warm stare.
I'd let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees' power a sweet
glistening at my core.

Source: Collected Poems (2013)

​

The poem employs clearly erotic imagery that seems feminine in nature (bees, flowers, the "sweet / glistening at my core"), which is hardly surprising as Swenson was gay. The extensive use of rhyme and slant rhyme give it a musicality that helps hold the poem together. Curiously, the slightly herky-jerky rhythms imposed by the counted metrics give the poem a kind of hesitant feeling, as if the poet is confessing her love without being completely sure that the person she is confessing it to shares her feelings.

I've tried writing counted verse myself without much success, probably in part because I don't understand the technique enough. It's kind of fun to try, though, and certainly gives a poem a very different feel—like free verse with the slightest possible formal structure.

 

[Tzara]

I think I've told you before that my love of modern poetry is very much influenced by The Young American Poets (1968, edited by Paul Carroll). There are some poems in it by Olson: when I read them I wasn't overly impressed. The poets who really grabbed me were Berrigan, Levertov, Padgett, Saint Giraud (aka Bill Knott).

I had a very influential anthology in my life as well: a small paperback titled In Youth that was edited by the ubiquitous avant-gardiste Richard Kostelanetz. It contained poems by such (then) unknown authors as Margaret Atwood (name-checking one of Piscator's submissions on this thread that I've haven't yet gotten around to commenting on), James Tate, Saint Geraud (aka Bill Knott), and the infamous Lyn Lifshin, whom our annaswirls had a bee in her bonnet about (perhaps because of Lifshin's self-aggrandizing title of "queen of the small presses"). There were stories by Frederick Barthelme, Thomas M. Disch (see previous post), and William Hjortsberg.

The odd thing about re-reading that volume (aside from the weirdness about reading something about "young authors," of whom many are now dead) is how some of my favorites from the book never produced much of anything else. It really reinforces my idea that some authors have only one book (or one story or one really good poem) in them. Which is way OK. I would much rather write one really good poem than books full of mediocre ones.

Why I don't try very hard to publish anything. I don't think I've written anything all that good.

So just to check myself I read Olson's Maximus written (I think) in the early 1980s. Still not so impressed. He's sort of doing what Berrigan was doing in the 60s, but not as well (no funny and ironic like Ted imo).

Olson was actually quite a bit older than Berrigan—he died in 1970. The Maximus poems were written between 1950 and his death, but only published later (the UC Berkeley edition was published in 1987). So it is much more likely Olson influenced Berrigan than the other way around, though it's not at all clear to me that he did influence Berrigan.

Anyway, I've tried to read some of the Maximus poems and found them, um, uninvolving.

You should post something by Berrigan here. I'd be interested on what you'd have to say about it.

 

[Tzara]

I was introduced to the book from which today's poem is from by a classmate, who had read it as part of an assignment. It is rare that I read and enjoy an entire book of poems; it's much more common that I like a few, perhaps even many, of the poems in a collection, but I found Alicia Ostriker's The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog thoroughly enjoyable. I could have chosen most any poem from the collection, but this is a good example of what I enjoy about the book:

Brightness Falls from the Air
Alicia Suskin Ostriker

Brightness falls from the air
said the old woman
like Bach's cello concerto
played by Pablo Casals
traveling the universe gently
like deep blue dust
I call it evening

Brightness falls from the air
said the bright red tulip
and when it does I lock
myself in the house
I draw the blinds
all night I breathe
my own suffocating perfume

Brightness falls from the air
said the dog
well so I use my brain
this happens all the time
if I go to sleep now
it will be bright again when I wake up
goodbye

Source: The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog (2014)
​

The use of three contrasting voices (with three contrasting responses to the theme of the poem) is one of the things I find really interesting about this poem and the other poems in the collection. That the three viewpoints are rather obvious (something like intellect, beauty, and earthiness) does not oversimplify the thematic development—in fact, I tend to think of them as being analogous to the x, y, and z axes of a kind of perceptual space. (Yes, I know, that's a rather ridiculous metaphor, but I don't mind being ridiculous.)

I've tried a few of these, though with different avatars than Ostriker used, and they're kind of interesting to write.

And, yeah, the dog is usually pretty funny.

 

[butters]

i this thread

especially that bees/eyes piece

 

[Tzara]

i this thread

especially that bees/eyes piece

Thank you, Ms. b.

 

[Angeline]

POEM
Saint Giraud (Bill Knott)

I am one man, worshipping silk knees,
picking myself from between my teeth,
I write these lines to cripple the dead,
to come up halt before the living:
I am one man, I run my hand over
your body, I touch the secret vibes
of the earth, I breathe your
heartbeat, Naomi, and always
I am one man alone at night. I fill my hands
with your dark hair
and offer it to the hollows of your face. I am one man,
searching,
alone at night
like a beacon of ashes.



The Young American Poets (1968, Paul Carroll, editor)

This poem was my first exposure to Bill Knott, when I was about 20. Even now, decades later, I find its intimacy and sensuality intoxicating. Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe my memories of college days and first love color my vision of it, but the images of a man who worships "silk knees" and offers his lover's hair to the hollows of her face, whose loneliness is like a beacon of ashes are beautiful and tactile. What woman wouldn't want her lover to write this about her?

 

[Angeline]

I am mulling which Ted Berrigan poem I want to post. My favorite is way too long for the thread (but there's a video of his son, Anselm, reading it here. Be forewarned: it's 12 minutes of Berrigan at his wackiest and one doesn't, imho, realize just how good it is till you reach its rather surprising finish. So yeah, I'll choose something more accessible).

I was thinking of posting an Ostriker poem, but you beat me to it! She taught at Rutgers when I was there, y'know. The poet Penelope Schott did, too. She was my Shakespeare professor. If I find a poem of hers online that really grabs me I'll share it.

I remember Richard Kostelanetz from my anthology. There were a few of his concrete poems: I recall a poem that looked like a traffic pattern made of uppercase "A"s. (Can't get to the book, but the poem was maybe called "Model A.")

Tzara sometimes I think in another life we were in the same classroom.

 

[Tzara]

When I posted the Alicia Ostriker poem, I commented that it was a more or less random choice from a volume of poems—that I enjoyed the entire collection and the poem I posted was just one of many I might have selected. My choice for today is sort of the same rationale, but also different. In Geffrey Davis's first book of poems, Revising the Storm, many of the poems focus on the narrator's relationship to his father. I find all of them emotionally and personally affecting, some much more so than the poem I am posting today, but this poem is kind of the first in a series: where the narrator's mother and father meet.

Plus, it's a really good poem and evocative of an era as well.

King County Metro
Geffrey Davis

In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man
boarding the bus, the one she's already

turning into my father. His style (if you can
call it that): disarming disregard—a loud

Hawaiian-print shirt and knee-high tube socks
that reach up the deep tone of his legs,

toward the dizzying orange of running shorts.
Outside, the gray city blocks lurch

past wet windows, as he starts his shy sway
down the aisle. Months will pass

before he shatters his ankle during a Navy drill,
the service discharging him back into the everyday

teeth of the world. Two of four kids will arrive
before he meets the friend who teaches him

the art of roofing and, soon after, the crack pipe—
the attention it takes to manage either

without destroying the hands. The air brakes gasp
as he approaches my mother's row,

each failed rehab and jail sentence still
decades off in the distance. So much waits

in the fabulous folds of tomorrow.
And my mother, who will take twenty years

to burn out her love for him, hesitates a moment
before making room beside her—the striking

brown face, poised above her head, smiling.
My mother will blame all that happens,

both good and bad, on this smile, which glows now,
ready to consume half of everything it gives.

Source: Revising the Storm (2014)
​

I attended a reading where Davis read this poem, among others, and really identified with him over his apparent diffidence and discomfort while reading as well as the tenderness of how he wrote about his parents, in particular his father. That he is black, a university professor, and young enough to be my son (he's thirty years my junior), doesn't matter—nor does the fact that his father succumbed to drug problems (my own father's weaknesses were rather more mundane). I had the odd experience of identifying both with the narrator and, to a lesser degree, the narrator's father.

For me, this is why academic analysis of poetry, while important, doesn't really tell me anything about whether I will respond to a poem. And since I am not an English professor, I want to read things that move me, that for whatever reason relate to me.

Perhaps that is selfish. I don't care.

 

[todski28]

When I posted the Alicia Ostriker poem, I commented that it was a more or less random choice from a volume of poems—that I enjoyed the entire collection and the poem I posted was just one of many I might have selected. My choice for today is sort of the same rationale, but also different. In Geffrey Davis's first book of poems, Revising the Storm, many of the poems focus on the narrator's relationship to his father. I find all of them emotionally and personally affecting, some much more so than the poem I am posting today, but this poem is kind of the first in a series: where the narrator's mother and father meet.

Plus, it's a really good poem and evocative of an era as well.

King County Metro
Geffrey Davis

In Seattle, in 1982, my mother beholds this man
boarding the bus, the one she's already

turning into my father. His style (if you can
call it that): disarming disregard—a loud

Hawaiian-print shirt and knee-high tube socks
that reach up the deep tone of his legs,

toward the dizzying orange of running shorts.
Outside, the gray city blocks lurch

past wet windows, as he starts his shy sway
down the aisle. Months will pass

before he shatters his ankle during a Navy drill,
the service discharging him back into the everyday

teeth of the world. Two of four kids will arrive
before he meets the friend who teaches him

the art of roofing and, soon after, the crack pipe—
the attention it takes to manage either

without destroying the hands. The air brakes gasp
as he approaches my mother's row,

each failed rehab and jail sentence still
decades off in the distance. So much waits

in the fabulous folds of tomorrow.
And my mother, who will take twenty years

to burn out her love for him, hesitates a moment
before making room beside her—the striking

brown face, poised above her head, smiling.
My mother will blame all that happens,

both good and bad, on this smile, which glows now,
ready to consume half of everything it gives.

Source: Revising the Storm (2014)
​

I attended a reading where Davis read this poem, among others, and really identified with him over his apparent diffidence and discomfort while reading as well as the tenderness of how he wrote about his parents, in particular his father. That he is black, a university professor, and young enough to be my son (he's thirty years my junior), doesn't matter—nor does the fact that his father succumbed to drug problems (my own father's weaknesses were rather more mundane). I had the odd experience of identifying both with the narrator and, to a lesser degree, the narrator's father.

For me, this is why academic analysis of poetry, while important, doesn't really tell me anything about whether I will respond to a poem. And since I am not an English professor, I want to read things that move me, that for whatever reason relate to me.

Perhaps that is selfish. I don't care.

Aside from the specific details this battered love story could be similar to my own parents sort of lol,
The troupe when written well always pulls you apart especially if you’ve lived it, the writing is deftly handled with a focus on the small details in the moment and broad stroke definitions of the future the synergy of the juxtaposition really holds it together.

Art is a selfish indulgence when you’re reading or viewing for you own sake for me it’s less so when you are writing if you want others to read it.

 

[Tzara]

I am mulling which Ted Berrigan poem I want to post. My favorite is way too long for the thread (but there's a video of his son, Anselm, reading it here. Be forewarned: it's 12 minutes of Berrigan at his wackiest and one doesn't, imho, realize just how good it is till you reach its rather surprising finish. So yeah, I'll choose something more accessible).

It is pretty crazy, what with references to the Fugs, John Cage, Guillaume Apollinare, Ron Padgett, and William Burroughs. I got confused very early when Anselm read "La Cienega" (a boulevard in Los Angeles) as "La-see-an-AY-ga." (I think, based on my limited time in LA, it's more like "La-SEE-EN-e-ga.") But that whole thing about addresses being inserted into poems seemed very Berrigan.

My favorite line? The true test of a man is a bunt. Yay, baseball.

I remember Richard Kostelanetz from my anthology. There were a few of his concrete poems: I recall a poem that looked like a traffic pattern made of uppercase "A"s. (Can't get to the book, but the poem was maybe called "Model A.")

It was from his "Tribute to Henry Ford." There were like five or six concrete poems (visual poems) that placed "A"s and "T"s in various traffic patterns. I first saw these in an anthology in high school, which must have been almost immediately after they were first published in 1968, since I was a senior in 1970-71.

Tzara sometimes I think in another life we were in the same classroom.

I was the shy guy sitting in the back of the room trying to get up the courage to ask if you wanted to go to the Patti Smith concert with me, while at the same time plotting to whoop your ass on the midterm essay test on the Beats.

 

[Tzara]

POEM
Saint Giraud (Bill Knott)

I am one man, worshipping silk knees,
picking myself from between my teeth,
I write these lines to cripple the dead,
to come up halt before the living:
I am one man, I run my hand over
your body, I touch the secret vibes
of the earth, I breathe your
heartbeat, Naomi, and always
I am one man alone at night. I fill my hands
with your dark hair
and offer it to the hollows of your face. I am one man,
searching,
alone at night
like a beacon of ashes.



The Young American Poets (1968, Paul Carroll, editor)

This poem was my first exposure to Bill Knott, when I was about 20. Even now, decades later, I find its intimacy and sensuality intoxicating. Maybe it's nostalgia. Maybe my memories of college days and first love color my vision of it, but the images of a man who worships "silk knees" and offers his lover's hair to the hollows of her face, whose loneliness is like a beacon of ashes are beautiful and tactile. What woman wouldn't want her lover to write this about her?

You probably don't remember, but you first suggested to me that I might like Bill Knott. Then, at my local poetry bookstore, I found some of his self-produced poetry collections, as one of the owners of the store had been his student.

I had planned on posting a poem by Knott, so touché—I beat you to Ostriker, you beat me to Knott.

The thing that makes me sad about this poem is that I don't know that Knott ever was in a long-term (or, for that matter, short-term) relationship with a woman. I don't know that he wasn't, but that longing, " I am one man, / searching, / alone at night / like a beacon of ashes" is something I remember and understand.

 

[Tzara]

I happened to read an article this morning about how the New York Yankees and the Philadelphia Flyers had stopped playing Kate Smith's recording of "God Bless America" at their games because other recordings of hers were of racist songs. That got me thinking about how much things have changed during my lifetime and that, as late as the middle sixties, marriage between whites and other races was illegal in various states.

For Natasha Trethewey, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Native Guard, the anti-miscegenation laws were more than an intellectual problem:

Miscegenation
Natasha Trethewey

In 1965 my parents broke two laws of Mississippi;
they went to Ohio to marry, returned to Mississippi.

They crossed the river into Cincinnati, a city whose name
begins with a sound like sin, the sound of wrong—mis in Mississippi.

A year later they moved to Canada, followed a route the same
as slaves, the train slicing the white glaze of winter, leaving Mississippi.

Faulkner’s Joe Christmas was born in winter, like Jesus, given his name
for the day he was left at the orphanage, his race unknown in Mississippi.

My father was reading War and Peace when he gave me my name.
I was born near Easter, 1966, in Mississippi.

When I turned 33 my father said, It’s your Jesus year—you’re the same
age he was when he died. It was spring, the hills green in Mississippi.

I know more than Joe Christmas did. Natasha is a Russian name—
though I’m not; it means Christmas child, even in Mississippi.

Source: Native Guard (2007)
​

The poem is formally a ghazal, a form chosen perhaps for its line-ending repetitions of the word "Mississippi," as if it is a condemnation repeated over and over.

Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that ruled anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional, dates from 1967, the year after Natasha Trethewey was born.

Joe Christmas is a character in William Faulkner's Light in August.

 

[Angeline]

Tzara your ghazal made me want to post another example. It's really a marvelous form.

Hip-Hop Ghazal
by Patricia Smith

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping 'tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin', gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin' down Manhattan streets
killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

Poetry Foundation, 2007
*****************************"*******

So this poem is like a party. Sisters are sashaying around, dancing and grinding, throating their heartbreak and filling the poem with sight and sound. The images and structure (two lines and pause; two more lines and pause and so on) create an infectious rhythm that makes you want to move with it. It's lively!

I should also note that this Ghazal (like Tzara's excellent example) show the marvelous flexibility of the form. It doesn't follow all the rules but it retains the essence of the form: the couplets can each stand on their own, but taken as a group convey a greater theme. I love writing this form and this is the poem that inspired me to try them out.

 

[Tzara]

I have been trying to post poems in this thread that were written by more or less contemporary poets and poems that I thought most of the members of the PF&D forum might not be familiar with. But today I wanted to post a poem with some kind of connection to Easter, just because. I considered posting the lyrics to Patti Smith's "Easter," but that seemed a bit like cheating. So I ended up picking perhaps the most famous "Easter" poem I know, by William Butler Yeats:

Easter, 1916
William Butler Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our wingèd horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)
​

The subject of the poem of course has nothing to do with the Christian holiday, but rather with the 1916 Easter Rebellion in Ireland that was quickly put down by the British authorities. A number of the leaders were executed, and Yeats's poem is a memorial to several of them. The Wikipedia article on the poem provides quite a bit of detail about the subjects and about the symbolism of the poem.

And of course you may still post a Yeats poem, Angie.

 

[Tzara]

Hip-Hop Ghazal
by Patricia Smith

This is one great poem. And one really relevant to this thread. The thing is sexy as hell:

Crying 'bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

I dunno, maybe I just like women's hips. At least when they're slinging. (Where's the damn cat roar emoji when I need it?)

 

[Tzara]

I'm trying something different today. This afternoon I was browsing in one of my favorite bookstores, paying particularly close attention to the books in the poetry section, as the store had these marked down twenty percent because of it being National Poetry Month. When you pick up a used copy, one already pretty low cost, and then lop another twenty percent off the price, you can experiment a bit in selecting work you might not otherwise buy.

I'd actually heard of Peter Pereira, as he is fairly prominent here in Seattle in the poetry community, both because he's a good poet, but also because he's one of the founders of Floating Bridge Press, which, among other things, holds an annual chapbook competition that carries significant prestige in the northwest. Pereira is also a physician and I found the following poem interesting both because of the medical condition being descibed and for his ruminations on the emotional/spiritual implications of that condition:

Fetus Papyraceous
Peter Pereira

Sometimes one of the twins dies
in utero, without his mother
ever knowing she'd been twice blessed.
Hungry for life, the living twin
will absorb his double and, growing,
compress him until all that's left
is a tiny shape made flat, a silhouette
of the life it once contained.
While the one child is born pink
and howling into his parents' arms,
the other remains a faint imprint
barely visible in the translucent web
of amniotic membranes—a fetal hieroglyph.
Some people believe twins have
only one soul between them.
If that's true, how many
of us are born half—
ignorant of our paper twin, the ghostly
shroud of an other self,
the blank page onto which all
our imagined lives are written.

Source: Saying the World (2003)
​

One of the things I really like about this poem is that it illustrates how varied the subject matter of a poem can be. Reading a textbook definition of the condition—Fetus papyraceus is a rare condition which describes a mummified fetus in a multiple gestation pregnancy in which one fetus dies and becomes flattened between the membranes of the other fetus and uterine wall. (from nih.gov)—the condition seems about as unlikely a source for a poem as one could possibly think of. But Pereira makes it work and work well, at least for me.

 

[Tzara]

The weather has turned somewhat nicer this afternoon—nicer for Seattle, that is, which means there are some sun breaks amid the general cloudy gloom. But it is Spring, the tulips are blooming in the Skagit Valley, and we PNW natives are celebrating actually seeing sunshine, at least occasionally.

So today's poem is about flowers. Sort of. It's also about form, and allusion to others forms and, oddly, vocabulary, which it tests, particularly with "rachitic," which means "rickety," from rachitis which is the Latin name for the disease of rickets.

Thyme Flowering among Rocks
Richard Wilbur

This, if Japanese,
Would represent grey boulders
Walloped by rough seas

So that, here or there,
The balked water tossed its froth
Straight into the air.

Here, where things are what
They are, it is thyme blooming,
Rocks, and nothing but—

Having, nonetheless,
Many small leaves implicit,
A green countlessness.

Crouching down, peering
Into perplexed recesses,
You find a clearing

Occupied by sun
Where, along prone, rachitic
Branches, one by one,

Pale stems arise, squared
In the manner of Mentha,
The oblong leaves paired.

One branch, in ending,
Lifts a little and begets
A straight-ascending

Spike, whorled with fine blue
Or purple trumpets, banked in
The leaf-axils. You

Are lost now in dense
Fact, fact which one might have thought
Hidden from the sense,

Blinking at detail
Peppery as this fragrance,
Lost to proper scale

As, in the motion
Of striped fins, a bathysphere
Forgets the ocean.

It makes the craned head
Spin. Unfathomed thyme! The world's
A dream, Basho said,

Not because that dream's
A falsehood, but because it's
Truer than it seems.

Source: Collected Poems 1943-2004 (2004)
​

The stanza form metrically mimics the 5-7-5 syllabic structure of the common idea of haiku, but Wilbur enhances this by rhyming the stanzas ABA, with no carryover rhyme across stanzas. This, along with the explicit Bashō references, links the poems not only to the tradition of East Asian poetry, but to the veneration of nature found in that tradition, even as the rhyme pattern links the poem to its very Western European heritage.

Wooly thyme growing in rockeries is quite common in Seattle gardens, so the basic image seems very homey to me.

 

[Tzara]

Bonus poem, from Rattle. All I will say is that it's certainly current, and good, I think, and, well, published. Follow this link to read it.

 

[Angeline]

This poetry (and jazz!) month is just flying. It is full-on Spring here in Appalachia and lovely. Tzara I introduced you to Bill Knott? I totally forgot that and I agree, it's hard to know if there ever was a relationship with Naomi. Signs, as the Magic 8 Ball says, point to no. But those poems, that yearning quality!

Still thinking about Ted Berrigan and I realized that one must first acknowledge the poet who seems to me his main influence, Frank O'Hara. I wish more people would explore O'Hara's poems. He is imho one of the best poets of the 20th century, certainly the latter half of it. Even now his voice sounds modern and fresh to me, with an openness that is so appealing. He died young (40, I think) in a tragic accident. I wonder how his voice would have matured had he lived.
********************

Mayakovsky
Frank O'Hara

1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

Meditations in an Emergency, Grove Press/Atlantic Inc., 1996.

While this is maybe not Frank's most accessible poem (consider the book it's from), it deals with themes that resonate for him: anxiety, worrying over relationships and whether he exists if he isn't loved, whether poetry even matters without love. Also note, even in this anxious state his voice is familiar and present. This is more soliloquy than narrative. And then there's that coup de grâce 4th section, which is so stunning and cool even Don Draper reads it.

 

[Tzara]

Angie's Frank O'Hara poem (very, very cool Mad Men reference) made me think of one of my favorite poets, O'Hara's fellow New York School poet, Kenneth Koch.

Koch is one of the first poets I fell in love with, after reading his book-length narrative poem Ko, or A Season on Earth, written in ottava rima and featuring a young Japanese baseball player, an "action poet" (satirizing the then-current Abstract Expressionists and their literary pals), and various other incongruous subjects and themes. I found it witty, hilarious, and a bit impenetrable.

This is one of my favorite Koch poems, though far from his most serious. He was sometimes serious—well, sort of serious.

Variations On A Theme By William Carlos Williams
Kenneth Koch

1
I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2
We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3
I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4
Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Source: The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch (2005)
​

The poem referenced here is "This Is Just To Say," one of Williams' most famous poems. The resonances with Angie's O'Hara poem are several: Koch and O'Hara were friends, as implied above; they were both oftentimes irreverent in their style and choice of themes; Koch was a significant influence on Matthew and Michael Dickman, whose book 50 American Plays (Poems) is a direct homage to Koch's One Thousand Avant-Garde Plays (also funny and brilliant); and Matthew Dickman's next-to-last book is titled Mayakovsky's Revolver (which is also very good). Everything connects to everything else!

Or not.

Also, both O'Hara and Koch were painted by Alex Katz.

 

[Tzara]

One of the things that really attracts me to a poem is a particularly strong and interesting rhythm. This can be in the context of metrical poetry of various kinds (e.g. accentual verse, syllabic verse, or accentual-syllabic verse), phrasally-based rhythms (think of some of Whitman's or Ginsberg's poems), or even free verse.

The following is one of my favorite examples of rhythm in free verse. Alan Dugan gives us a narrative with a jerky, hesitant rhythm, controlled by his often eccentric line breaks and his stuttering repetitions of certain words:

Drunken Memories of Anne Sexton
Alan Dugan

The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you know," as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? And just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
"Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green"
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others' beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.

Source: Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (2001)
​

The result is that the poem conveys the narrator's confusion and awkwardness, particularly when compared to the elegance of the line he attributes to his "beautiful enemy," Galway Kinnell.

Despite Dugan having won the Yale Younger Poets Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry (twice), he doesn't seem to be much read anymore, though he has a wonderfully cranky voice, particularly on the subject of the Vietnam War, which he detested.

In any case, I still really like him.


For those interested, here's a photograph of the "two beautiful poets."

 

[Angeline]

Not done with Frank O'Hara!

Yesterday I spent a few hours reading Frank O'Hara poems, deciding which one to post here. And then in a frenzy of O'Hara love, I picked up a biography, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara by Brad Gooch. I'm excited to be reading it!

Anyway after I posted Mayakovsky I felt I hadn't chosen a poem that best demonstrates what *I* most love about his writing. So Tzara I hope you'll forgive me for sharing two pieces by the same writer.


The Day Lady Died
Frank O'Hara

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing


Lunch Poems, 1964, City Lights Books.

"Lady" is, of course, Billie Holiday who died in July, 1959. I love O'Hara's casual voice, his meandering details that lead to that final image that make the narrator's shock that much more visceral to a reader. I love his irony, his self-deprecation. "After practically going to sleep with quandariness" makes me laugh because I can so relate. O'Hara often wrote about New York City (it was his adopted home) and, to me, the city he portrays is not many years behind the way I first remember it. It feels like home to me. And while he has many jazz references in his poems this is not really, in spite of the title, a poem about jazz. It's more about that moment when one is struck by great loss, how unexpectedly it stills one in the midst of an ordinary day. O'Hara throws many references at a reader. You can learn from looking them up but their purpose here, imho, is to convey the ordinary details of his day which
contrast with the ending. O'Hara described his writing style as "I do this, I do that," which really comes across in this poem.

You can watch him reading it here.

 

[Tzara]

Yesterday I spent a few hours reading Frank O'Hara poems, deciding which one to post here. And then in a frenzy of O'Hara love, I picked up a biography, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara by Brad Gooch. I'm excited to be reading it!

Anyway after I posted Mayakovsky I felt I hadn't chosen a poem that best demonstrates what *I* most love about his writing. So Tzara I hope you'll forgive me for sharing two pieces by the same writer.

Let me refer to my original post:

What I would like to propose is that you post a poem that is meaningful to you and talk a bit about why it is meaningful to you.

Nothing about repeating poets or poems. Just about that it meant something to you. So you're good.

And anyway, that is an effing fantastic poem.

So thank you, m'dear.

 

[Tzara]

This one is gonna be a bit different. The late C. D. Wright was often something of an experimentalist and this poem is, among other things, an exercise in fragmented narrative—perhaps an exercise in fragmented consciousness. The title, and to some degree the form, are taken from the analytic philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein's posthumous book Remarks on Color. Wittgenstein was famous (or notorious) for presenting his writings as a series of numbered remarks. Sometimes, as in Wright's poem, the remarks commented upon a previous remark; sometimes they would introduce a completely different thought or argument. The technique is similar to what Wright employed in her book-length poem Deepstep Come Shining (though in that book the remarks were not numbered).

Remarks on Color
C. D. Wright

1. highway patched with blacktop, service station at the crossroads
2. cream soda in the popbox, man sitting on the popbox
3. a fully grown man
4. filthy toilets, just hold it a little while longer
5. shacks ringed with day lilies, then a columned house in shade
6. condensation off soybeans
7. someone known as Skeeter
8. his whole life
9. flatbed loaded with striped melons
10. Lopez's white car at JB's mothers's house
11. katydids crepitating in the tall grass
12. gar wrapping itself in your line
13. gourds strung between poles
14. imagine a tribe of color-blind people, and there could easily be one, they would not have the same color concepts as we do
15. that's trumpet vine; that's what we call potato vine
16. no potatoes come of it though
17. no potatoes I know
18. I come back here about three years ago to see if I could eke out a living then I run on to Rhonda
19. help me Rhonda help help me Rhonda
20. E-Z on E-Z off
21. out of wedlock, wedlocked
22. planks nailed across kitchen doorway for a bar; living room turned into dance floor
23. drinking canned heat
24. the shit can make you permanently blind
25. sizzling nights
26. what do you suppose became of Fontella Bass
27. get your own sound then notes go with your sound—it's like a color, my color—I'm black brown with a little red-orange in my skin
28. red looks good on me
29. and yet we could imagine circumstances under which we would say, these people see other colors in addition to ours
30. what the Swede concluded: if you want to know what's the matter with blacks in America study the other side of the color line
31. I am just telling you what the man figured out
32. there is, after all, no commonly accepted criterion for what is a color unless it is one of our colors
33. check this:
34. at the time of his death Presley's was the second most reproduced image in the world
35. the first was Mickey Mouse
36. Lansky Brothers—down on Beale—outfitted the johns of Memphis
37. and Elvis
38. R-U ready for Jesus R-U packed up
39. just don't compare me to any white musicians
40. take me witcha man when you go

Source: Steal Away: Selected and New Poems (2002)
​

What does it mean? I'm not sure one could say that it has a definite meaning—it's more like the poetic equivalent of an Impressionist painting. My impression is that it is a commentary on color in the sense of "local color" (in this case, of the southern USA), color in the sense of racial disparity, and of both as concepts that philosophically are constructs that do not necessarily represent "reality' (whatever that is).

Some of the lines appear to be quotations (lines 14, 29, and 32 are taken from Wittgenstein's book, for example), others appear to either be random snatches of conversation, either overheard by Wright or invented by her.

Anyway, I think this is a brilliant poem, though I recognize that most readers would likely consider it garbage, or at best a kind of over-intellectualized navel gazing.

Which is OK. We don't all like or appreciate the same things.

 

[AmericanTrash]

Anyway, I think this is a brilliant poem, though I recognize that most readers would likely consider it garbage, or at best a kind of over-intellectualized navel gazing.

Which is OK. We don't all like or appreciate the same things.[/QUOTE]

I think it is brilliant as well. The numbered list just accentuates the structureless shatter of human experience. Or something.