Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

The Scent of Skunk

gasp and sweetness
atmosphere a proof
of time passing

air displaced
by what bristles at
sprays

let the owl
swoop down
barred wings batter

what passes
gasp and sweetness
we breathe

         -> next

Carol Peters

[from Muddy Prints, Water Shine]

Along the Shore of Lake Pinewild

Fish fan in the man's shadow.
He squats and huffs

at the white geese
hissing.

The stone in his shoe
is evidence.

A gander paddlewheels
on jeweled legs.

[originally published in Realpoetik]

         -> next

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who came to my readings Thursday and Friday in Charleston.

I began both readings with an excerpt from A. R. Ammons's poem, "Identity," and I highly recommend that you read his poem "Nelly Myers" on pages 14-17 of this downloadable PDF file from Ohio State University.

Pattiann Rogers

[from Pattiann Rogers's Wayfare, 2008]

Portrait During the Creation of Sleep

Like the elm's shadow
disappearing at noon
into the trunk, branch,
and full leaf of its presence,
so Lila disappears in sleep,
becoming the fully bountiful
body of her body.

I say sleep is a place, the very
being of place, tangible,
alive. It is the suffocation
of the void from which breath
rises, the progenitor of sleep.

Lila closes her eyes, lays
her head on her pillow, moves
willingly, easily, as if to a lover,
toward the being of sleep.
She knows the way.

Like the power of the god
of absence, sleep transfigures
its creator.

No strumming wind, no surf,
no chitter or hum, no angelic
chorus — sleep, without sound
of itself, is the engendering
space of sound.

I say sleep is not faith
but all the atoms of faith
not yet united.

Lila lays her head
on the pillow, closes
the god of her eyes, lifts
like a shadow and disappears
into the full and boundless
forest of the sleep she sleeps.

Wayfare

A. R. Ammons

[excerpted from A. R. Ammons's "Identity" from Collected Poems: 1951:1971, 1972]

it is
wonderful
       how things work: I will tell you
                   about it
                   because

it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
       and stars and spider webs
and known
                   is loved:
             in that love,
             each of us knowing it,
             I love you

Collected Poems 1951-1971

Beth Ann Fennelly

[two sections from a 15-section poem from Beth Ann Fennelly's Unmentionables, 2008]

Say You Waved: A Dream Song Cycle

6.

Free will is the question, to me & most.
How much can we fault our dead dads?
If I'd allow, the AA book
would say "disease," of rage unpurple me. Confess,
JB: willed you to be a night-mayor
of the flesh?

Can I lay blame — "'42: Marries Eileen . . . '47: First infidelity . . ."?
And if I can't, how praise my stallion solely
rutting apple-munching me?
Stabled. (Sugar-cube teeth beyond the fence
have I desired? Natch. But no touch-touch.)
(Not much.)

"Free Willie" is the question, a U.S. flick
about a whale I saw previewed in London,
where "willie" is slang for "dick."
Free Willie. Like whales the giggles breached.
Is accountability just that, some cosmic
inadvertent joke?


7.

Of your strict stanzas only nuns should speak,
& of your crumpled syntax only imbeciles
& armadillos, mystics,
children, & those who dream
of Calder mobiles piloted through wind tunnels
by angels on LSD.

In roadside Mexico a man macheted pineapple,
sprinkled it with salt & lime & hellborn chili dust.
It cost less than a buck.
Don't eat it, a fellow tourist warned, coming off the bus.
I ate it. So with your words
my lips sweetburn.

I get (ish) it. I pumped my swing at six
so hard my sneakers toed the sky. You
know, don't you,
what happened next — after the swing set's stiff legs
rocked thrice — but before I hit the ground —
I flew.

[for the entire poem, go to Blackbird, Fall 2007 Vol. 6 No. 2]

Unmentionables: Poems

Valerio Magrelli

[Valerio Magrelli translated by Dana Gioia from New European Poets edited by Kevin Prufer and Wayne Miller, 2008]

I have often imagined that glances
survive the act of seeing
as if they were poles,
measuring rods, lances
thrown in a battle.
Then I think that in a room
one has just left
those same lines must stay behind
sometimes suspended there and criscrossed
untouched and overlaid like the wooden pieces
in a game of pickup sticks.

New European Poets

C. D. Wright

[from C. D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining, 1998]

After the iridectomy
the slow recognition of forms

A shirt on the floor looked like
the mouth of a well

Spots on a horse
horrible holes in its side

The sun in the tree
green hill of crystals

Moon over Milledgeville
only a story

Saucer of light on the wall
the hand of god

. . .

Early every evening she sits on the steps of her trailer. The
dirt yard raked. Caterpillar fording the furrows. Mercy,
Louise. If it wasn't hot hot hot. Cornlight. Eyes drink the
color and are refreshed. Images seen but not interpreted.
Thanks to her lovely twin trees the water she drew was cool.
Cool the water she drank from the pump.

Deepstep Come Shining

Daniel Nathan Terry

[from Daniel Nathan Terry's Capturing the Dead, 2007]

Noah Williams

Harvest of Death
Negative by Timothy O'Sullivan
5 July 1863 Gettysburg

Spread-eagle on the field
of Gettysburg
the dead arch their backs

as if the ground they lie upon
won't forgive them
and wants them gone,

as if pulled
by ropes hooked
into their breastbones.

Their torsos swell
toward Heaven
as if the Lord

has only this
small mercy left.
Or is it as simple

as the grip of death
and decay:
muscles tensing

before finally letting go,
hollow bellies
full of vapor? Is it as natural

as the orchard in the valley —
these windfall men
ripened and ready

for the camera to commence
its thorough
and slow gathering?

A. R. Ammons

[from A. R. Ammons Collected Poems: 1951-1971, 1972]

Mechanism

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
          morality: any working order,
       animate or inanimate: it

has managed directed balance,
          the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
       some energy left to the mechanism,

some ash, enough energy held
          to maintain the order in repair,
       assure further consumption of entropy,

expending energy to strengthen order:
          honor the persisting reactor,
       the container of change, the moderator: the yellow

bird flashes black wing-bars
          in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
       startles the hawk with beauty,

flitting to a branch where
          flash vanishes into stillness,
       hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:

honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
          the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
       of control,

the gastric transformations, seed
          dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
       chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,

blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
          unique genes,
       molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into

sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
          in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
       some cells set aside for the special work, mind

or perception rising into orders of courtship,
          territorial rights, mind rising
       from the physical chemistries

to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
          and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
       racial satisfaction:

heat kept by a feathered skin:
          the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
       burner under the flask)

so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
          interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
       efficiency — the vessel firm, the flame

staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
             necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
         the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the

goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
             that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
         great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.

Collected Poems 1951-1971

Laure-Anne Bosselaar

[from Laure-Anne Bosselaar's A New Hunger, 2007]

Friends,

this is the viscous heart I hide from you:
gnashing, polluted, hooked to my ribs
like a burr, stuck there and stinging,
and it's only 4:14 in the morning.

Those sudden shudders my waking alarm,
then the daily discipline of shutting away that heart,
shambling through the house, touching things,
stroking their shapes as if it could help me

not be the Bad Sower's daughter each morning:
the pit from a seed he sowed and left to parch,
and no crows would feed on it. So I lived. I don't
want to explain this further, I'm done with it.

But this for you: on the days I hold your books,
read your letters, recall a gaze, the delicate
dangle of an earring, or the throwing
back of a head in laughter,

it's you seeding the first beat into the heart
I open. And as the sun heaves daylight
into the parched tree by my window,
and rats burrow away, when pigeons come

down to feed on dust and pizza crusts, I thrum
the lit syllables of your names on my sill with all
ten fingers, typing them firmly into the brick,
and counting their beats, counting their beats.

A New Hunger

Steve Gehrke

[from Steve Gehrke's Michelangelo's Seizure", 2007]

Renoir, Arthritic

He's up early, considering the body,
its wetness, the bladder
like a puffer fish, the bowels
swallowing and swallowing,
mucus, come, blood, the soft crab
of the heart, darkly breathing,
the lungs spread out in the chest
like wings of a manta-ray,
not to mention the rich coral
of brain, the whole body
a trapped sea, netted in the skin,
perception itself just the motion
of the waves, the boat-wake
of experience healing into memory,
so that lying there, waiting to ring
the tiny silver bell that brings the nurse,
he feels his arthritis like a drought
inside of him, knowing the curative waters
at Bourbonne are no good, no good
the medicinal drip, his hand bruised
this morning where the brush was
strapped to it, though perhaps a bit of cloth
might be used between his fingers
and the wood, so that he can
continue to paint, to become
his rose-filled models, to feel
the elasticity of them, their fluidity
even in the hard desert-turtle
of his hand, so that he can continue
staring through the three-pronged
compass of the easel, until he gives
the signal and the canvas is raised
before him, like a sail, and he begins
to work, leaning forward, squinting,
drifting toward the horizon that he makes.

Michelangelo's Seizure (National Poetry Series)

Kimberly Johnson

[from Kimberly Johnson's Leviathan with a Hook, 2002]

Divine, Dredge

Severe the light, and in the ether
rough weather settles.
Ramshackle, headstrong valley,
headlands bare of tree, tired starts
of olive branching along the foothills.
Cisterns breached, water stands
in the path, taking on rust, a smell of turpentine,
red leaves moored against the shallows.

A quiver -- a red lizard on a rock:
I catch him, halve him with a knife.

Two slippery sagittal lizards, veins
interrupted, spilling into my hands,
second skin starting to buckle.
I thumb an edge, pull back
the scales . . . another pale lizard,
soft flesh, lidless eye
reflecting my abject, adjectival, earthbound, blessed body.

Leviathan With a Hook: Poems

Kimberly Johnson

[from Kimberly Johnson's Leviathan with a Hook, 2002]

Cold Front

At sunset, virga turns orange,
a fire infolding itself, its downwardness
sucked in, turned skyward and dense
in the cold atmosphere. Gold fire
on the wet fields, fire on the hemisphere.

The maple upturns porous leaves, barometric.
At the river, reeds rattle together, daylilies
yielding their petals to night.
Clearance lights necklace the hilltop in rubies.

In the thickening air, little firefly, light.
Lightning will shutter past midnight, and you
as in discourse, unshutter your small, candent
body, greening my eye-green.

Tomorrow morning morning's minstrel
will raise its brazen jackdaw cry,
bullfrogs shrieking at the river,
cattails bumping a clapboard symphony.

Leviathan With a Hook: Poems

the pope

on drugs

[AP] Pope Condemns Contraception, Warns Sex Can Be a 'Drug'

Rachel Zucker

on drugs

reasons to live

walkway

Federico Garcia Lorca

[from Federico Garcia Lorca's Collected Poems, 2002; translated by Catherine Brown]

VIII
Ghazal of Dark Death

I want to sleep the sleep of apples,
far away from the uproar of cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.

I don't want to hear that the dead lose no blood,
that the decomposed mouth is still begging for water.
I don't want to find out about grass-given martyrdoms,
or the snake-mouthed moon that works before dawn.

I want to sleep just a moment,
a moment, a minute, a century.
But let it be known that I have not died:
that there is a stable of gold in my lips,
that I am the West Wind's little friend,
that I am the enormous shadow of my tears.

Wrap me at dawn in a veil,
for she will hurl fistfuls of ants;
sprinkle my shoes with hard water
so her scorpion's sting will slide off.

Because I want to sleep the sleep of apples
and learn a lament that will cleanse me of earth;
because I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart out on the sea.

The Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition (Revised)

William Carlos Williams

[from The Autobiography of William Carlos Williams, 1948]

And so for the event of the evening, supper with James and Nora Joyce, at the only place at which Joyce would eat, the Trianon.

Joyce was not a tall man. He had a small, compressed head, straight nose and no lips, and spoke with a distinct, if internationalized, Irish accent. He would take no hard liquor, only white wine, a mild white wine, because of his eyes. He was almost blind from glaucoma. It was a wonderful evening, Nora, a sturdy one, hardly said a word.

Joyce, who was working at that time on the early Dublin parts of Finnegans Wake, was particularly anxious to talk with Floss, because she was Norse-speaking on her mother's side and the Norsemen had played a great part in Irish history.

We were all drinking white wine out of courtesy to Joyce, who, as he talked, went to fill Flossie's glass; but his aim was poor, the wine going beyond onto the table until she moved her glass into a position to catch it and so saved the day.

As we started to drink another round, Bob McAlmon, who may have been a little tight, proposed, "Here's to sin!"

Joyce looked up suddenly. "I won't drink to that," he said.

So Bob took it back with a laugh and we all sipped our wine again silently.

--

Bob [McAlmon] told me of an incident which happened during a train ride he had had with Hem[ingway] on his way back from Spain a year before. They had stopped and the passengers had alighted for a breath of fresh air. Beside the track was a dead dog, his belly swollen, the skin of it iridescent with decay. Bob had wanted to get away from the stink as fast as he could, but Hem would not. On the contrary, he got out his notebook and began, to Bob's disgust, to take minute notes describing the carcass in all its beauth.

"I thoroughly approve," I said.

Autobiography of William Carlos Williams (A New Directions Paperbook)

poetry contests

[from Ron Silliman's blog]

I think for a lot of young writers, in particular, especially those coming out of MFA mills (and especially the programs that don’t quite “get” contemporary poetry, which is to say most of them), I think the transition to becoming a practicing writer can be a daunting, even crushing task. It’s when most people stop writing. They find that the context they had for poetry in school no longer exists in the “real” world and don’t know how to build one out of whole cloth. These are the people for whom contests exist, and it’s why I think they’re ultimately damaging. For one thing, the odds are preposterous. For another, unless they actually know the work of the judge, and know who the judge is, there is no way to ascertain if there is any reasonable expectation of even being competitive. They send in their money and their manuscript, they hope and they can feel crushed if they lose, sometimes again & again & again. Where if they would just get together with their friends and publish one another, they would be making enormous headway much more quickly. And their books would be reaching the right audiences. Which is (again) why it’s far better to have a volume published by Pressed Wafer, if you’re a New England poet, than in the Yale Younger Poets Series.

Hakalau

Hakalau stairway, originally uploaded by johnbryanpeters.

Ovid

[from Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Charles Martin, 2004]

"We'll show you girls just what real class is
Give up tryin' to deceive the masses
Your rhymes are fake: accept our wager
Learn which of us is minor and which is major
There's nine of us here and there's nine of you
And you'll be nowhere long before we're through
Nothin's gonna save you 'cuz your songs are lame
And the way you sing 'em is really a shame
So stop with, 'Well I never!' and 'This can't be real!'
We're the newest New Thing and here is our deal
If we beat you, obsolete you, then you just get gone
From these classy haunts on Mount Helicon
We give you Macedonia — if we lose
An' that's an offer you just can't refuse
So take the wings off, sisters, get down and jam
And let the nymphs be the judges of our poetry slam!"

Metamorphoses: A New Translation by Charles Martin

Caroline Conway

Hunter College Reading Series @ KGB Bar

Caroline Conway (poetry 2007), Manijeh Nasrabadi (creative non-fiction 2007), and Kym Ragusa (creative non-fiction 2007) will read Wednesday, April 23 from 7:00-9:00 PM at KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, between Bowery and 2nd Ave. The reading is FREE.

Caroline Conway co-edits the online journal RealPoetik with Ana Bozicevic-Bowling. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in LIT, New York Quarterly, ology, luzmag, and the Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets.

Ron Silliman on William Carlos Williams

[from Ron Silliman this morning, re judging the William Carlos Williams Award for the Poetry Society of America]

Thinking of Williams & his relations to presses & to kinds of poetry gave me a template for thinking through these 19 volumes. His idea that the function of art is to create additions to nature, to make of the world a more abundant place, seems to me almost the baseline of what should expected from a poet. If you’re only going to write poems that look just like the poems that existed before you got here, what is your value? All of the nineteen volumes move poetry forward in ways that should make a reader optimistic about poetry, even on a blood-drenched planet that is devouring the last of its major natural resources.

Dan Albergotti

[from Dan Albergotti's Boatloads, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, selected by Edward Hirsch, 2008]

Still Bound

Still here, and every morning it's almost a surprise
that the sun might come, that it could happen again.
This is how it is. The eagle arrives each day,
but not for my liver. Instead, she comes for my heart.
And it's still agony every time, although I have learned
by now how not to scream. Most days, she lights
on my shoulder, clenching her talons in the flesh,
and right away begins ripping down into my chest,
her head like a cold hammer, tail feathers brushing my nose.
She pulls the heart out in long, thin strips, and flies away,
and I imagine her feeding the dark flesh to her young.
Yet some days, she will light on the rock beside me
and step softly up onto my chest. She will pace along it, stop,
cock her head, and stare into my eyes. Her own dark eye
will bloom wide. She will slowly blink, then lower her beak
to my skin and begin a gentle tearing until her small tongue
is pushing at the shell of my heart. She cuts it out clean
those days and almost seems sorry to leave, to fly off
as my hollowed chest burns. But she does. She flies up
and disappears into the distance, though I can make out
the dwindling speck of her in the great sky for hours.
The day is long. The day is long when you're growing a heart.
Still, look at how the sun falls behind that far peak,
how it glows like one steady eye gazing only here,
how it makes those colors burn and emanate where soon
it will be purely black, how it can make a gift of fire.

Dan Albergotti will be reading at 3 PM on April 17th at the Waccamaw Center for Higher Education in Pawley's Island, SC.

The Boatloads (A. Poulin, Jr. New Poets of America)

William Carlos Williams

[from William Carlos Williams's introduction to The Wedge, 1944]

A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant . . . Its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. Therefore each speech having its own character, the poetry it engenders will be peculiar to that speech also in its own intrinsic form. The effect is beauty, what in a single object resolves our complex feelings of propriety . . . When a man makes a poem, makes it, mind you, he takes words as he finds them interrelated about him and composes them -- without distortion which would mar their exact significances -- into an intense expression of his perceptions and ardors that they may constitute a revelation in the speech that he uses. It isn't what he says that counts as a work of art, it's what he makes, with such intensity of perception that it lives with an intrinsic movement of its own to verify its authenticity.

The Wedge

[from William Carlos Williams's Selected Poems, 1985]

These

are the desolate, dark weeks
when natures in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The year plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night

to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought

that spins a dark fire —
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles

to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself — Not a ghost but

would be embraced — emptiness,
despair — (They
whine and whistle) among

the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,

the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused —

Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous

ears and eyes — for itself.
In this mine they come to dig — all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing — that is now stone.

Selected Poems

Jorie Graham

You can read Part I of Jorie Graham's lastest collection, Sea Change, at the Harper Collins website by clicking on the Browse Inside button.

If you can make it, I'll see you at Jorie's reading at 7 PM on April 28th at the Brookline Booksmith in Brookline, MA.

Jorie Graham

Jorie Graham has a new book, Sea Change, available in print and on the Amazon Kindle.

Deirdre Wenger interviews Jorie Graham at phillyburbs.com. This excerpt from the end of the interview:

DW: What would you suggest to people who are aspiring to be writers and poets? Do you have any advice on how to achieve their goals.

JG: I hate giving advice. But if I take a stab at it today — today I would say: read. Read complete works of poets, to learn what a whole poetic “idiom” is. Also walk, look, smell, taste, touch, listen. Get your body back. Try to make yourself use all your senses every day. There is a vast amount of “information” that is coming at one from sources one doesn’t even know exist. Get outside. Find the strange — not the weird, but the mysterious. We all need to work on staying awake. This is a somnolent era. Growing more so. We need to work hard, pretty much all the time, to achieve moments of presence and wakefulness. Also, avoid living too much in the conceptual intellect at the expense of your body — the “thinky death” Berryman calls it. Undergo poems before you jump to interpretation. Wait till it is absolutely necessary to begin to think “about” the poem, or what it might “mean." Your own or someone else’s.

Also, write as if there is no satellite to transmit your words. Write as if you are writing something that could be dug up out of the sand . . .

John Ruskin

[from John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice, 1851]

Observe that the value of this type does not consist in the mere shutting of the ornament into a certain space, but in the acknowledgement by the ornament of the fitness of the limitation; — of its own perfect willingness to submit to it; nay, of a predisposition in itself to fall into the ordained form, without any direct expression of the command to do so; an anticipation of the authority, and an instant and willing submission to it, in every fibre and spray; not merely willing but happy submission, as being pleased rather than vexed to have so beautiful a law suggested to it, and one which to follow is so justly in accordance with its own nature. You must not cut out a branch of hawthorn as it grows, and rule a triangle round it, and suppose that it is then submitted to a law. Not a bit of it. It is only put in a cage, and will look as if it must get out, for its life, or wither in the confinement. But the spirit of triangle must be put in the hawthorn. It must suck in isoscelesism with its sap. Thorn and blossom, leaf and spray must grow with an awful sense of triangular necessity upon them, for the guidance of which they are to be thankful, and to grow all the stronger and more gloriously. And although there may be a transgression here and there, and an adaptation to some other need, or a reaching forth to some other end, greater even than triangle, yet this liberty is to be always accepted under the solemn sense of special permission, and when the full form is reached and the entire submission expressed and every blossom has a thrilling sense of its responsibility down to its tiniest stamen, you may take your terminal line away if you will. No need of it any more. The commandment is written in the heart of the thing.

The Stones of Venice

Sandra Meek

Reading by Sandra Meek
Poetry Society of South Carolina
7 PM, Friday, April 11, 2008
Second Presbyterian Church
Charleston, SC

Sandra Meek won the 2006 Dorset Prize for her poetry collection Biogeography. She won the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry for Nomadic Foundations, as well as the Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, which she won again for Burn. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Shenandoah, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, Colorado Review, and many others. Meek was awarded Editors' Choice for the 2002 James Wright Award given by Mid-American Review. She is a professor of English at Berry College where she teaches creative writing and contemporary literature. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana from 1989 to 1991.

[from Sandra Meek's Burn, 2005]

Reentering Atmosphere

Evening's laddered with ash, jet-line of pale
unraveling silk: primitive web, all axis and latitude. There's
     democracy

in entropy. Which is why
there are so many flights all ending in runways, blinking
dotted lines, a jumpsuited man

wielding an arrow of light. Reassuring,

really, how night chisels the spectrum
to five shades of bone; how even the fly's

eight-paneled world shutters down
room by room in the spider's mid-air collision

of geometry and the aesthetics of hunger. If prayers were certain
to be heard, what

gravity they would take — the targeted
news of the hour, like yesterday's

civil war in pixels: refugees crouching in a landscape
of sand and static. The pattern's always been broken by one

off-colored bead signaling

mortality, the true believer. Now
the space shuttle has landed, earth's blue marble safely

rattling about one crew member's dreams.
Outside the bedroom window, a million newly hatched souls

swarm the streetlamp. It's still summer, and someone

is out late for a walk. The earth pulls from beneath
the road's tar strip like swamp mud, quicksand
in a bad movie which nevertheless

made him weep, even back out in the parking lot sun.

Burn

Sandra Meek

[from Sandra Meek's Nomadic Foundations, 2002]

Chameleon

Even the next day you wouldn't
answer why — and I knew I didn't
know you, the smell of beer a rotted
halo around you saying I didn't know
what I was doing, pushing the rock
into the mouth of your cave
by removing yourself from your
self the way this chameleon tries to lean
away from his body on stiff legs
and hopes I don't see him
there in the dust, the mottled greens
and browns of his skin,
eye raised on its cone
like the eye into the volcano
long dormant, no smoke or flame
down there, just darkness and air
enough to feed the flame if ever
it should return, the burn, the flash
of recognition, as when I remember
writing the other night, how the page gleamed
like damp skin in the candlelight, like
my skin, my face, and your voice
a knock at the door went
unanswered.

Nomadic Foundations

Cole Swensen

[from Cole Swensen's The Book of a Hundred Hands, 2005]

The Hand Thinks

There's a hand that thinks, that lies inside, that lines the hand that
    moves

and it thinks: "While tying a knot, you can utterly forget, you can
    think
(can be thinking of something else at the time)
                                    that muscles have a memory all their own
that lives again a braided time
                                                 alive
                                                 I tie.

                                                 Watch
what without you lives. The life of fingers
harbors
mutiny that doesn't even bother.                    The hand, ever prior
avatar of architecture: archlessly, each one

is a frame.
There's an empty frame on the wall         and the hand is the sky
that opens the wall.

The Book of a Hundred Hands (Kuhl House Poets)

Jonathan Williams

[from Rivendell Issue 4: Native Genius, Spring 2007]

A Chorale* of Cherokee Night Music as Heard through
an Open Window in Summer Long Ago

WAHUHU WAHUHU WAH
UKU UGUKU UGUKU UGU
U HUHU HUHU HUHU HU
LU LALU LALU LALU LA
TU TALATU TALATU TAL
LILI TSKIKLILI TSIKILILI
IKIKI TSIKIKI TSIKIKI T
U KAGU KAGU KAGU KA
WAYA WAYA WAYA WAYA
YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH
NA GUNA GUNA GUNA GU
SASA SASA SASA SASA S
UNU KUNUNU KUNUNU
DUSTU DUSTU DUSTU D

*screech owl/hoot owl/yellow-breasted chat/ jar-fly/cricket/carolina chickadee/katydid/crow/wolf/Beatles/turkey/goose/bullfrog/spring frog

[this is a half-rendering; the typography is the other half; buy Rivendell to see this and other wonders]

John Wieners

[from John Wieners's Selected Poems: 1958-1984]

A Poem for Vipers

I sit in Lees. At 11:40 PM with
Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me
Ju Ju. Hot on the table before us
shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom
chow yuke. Up the street under the wheels
of a strange car is his stash — The ritual.
We make it. And have made it.
For months now together after midnight.
Soon I know the fuzz will
interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and
I shall be placed on probation. The poem
does not lie to us. We lie under
its law, alive in the glamour of this hour
able to enter into the sacred places
of his dark people, who carry secrets
glassed in their eyes and hide words
under the coats of their tongue.

Selected Poems: 1958-1984

Hillary

[according to Peggy Noonan at www.opinionjournal.com]

I think we've reached a signal point in the campaign. This is the point where, with Hillary Clinton, either you get it or you don't. There's no dodging now. You either understand the problem with her candidacy, or you don't. You either understand who she is, or not. And if you don't, after 16 years of watching Clintonian dramas, you probably never will.

That's what the Bosnia story was about. Her fictions about dodging bullets on the tarmac — and we have to hope they were lies, because if they weren't, if she thought what she was saying was true, we are in worse trouble than we thought — either confirmed what you already knew (she lies as a matter of strategy, or, as William Safire said in 1996, by nature) or revealed in an unforgettable way (videotape! Smiling girl in pigtails offering flowers!) what you feared (that she lies more than is humanly usual, even politically usual).

But either you get it now, or you never will. That's the importance of the Bosnia tape.

Allen Ginsberg

[from Allen Ginsberg's Notes for Howl and Other Poems, 1959]

A word on Academies; poetry has been attacked by an ignorant & frightened bunch of bores who don't understand how it's made, & the trouble with these creeps is they wouldn't know Poetry if it came up and buggered them in broad daylight.

A word on the Politicians: my poetry is Angelical Ravings, & has nothing to do with dull, materialistic vagaries about who should shoot who. The secrets of individual imagination — which are transconceptual & non-verbal — I mean unconditioned Spirit — are not for sale to this consciousness, are of no use to this world, except perhaps to make it shut its trap & listen to the music of the Spheres. Who denies the music of the spheres denies poetry, denies man, & spits on Blake, Shelley, Christ & Buddha. Meanwhile have a ball. The universe is a new flower. American will be discovered. Who wants a war against roses will have it. Fate tells big lies, & the gay Creator dances on his own body in Eternity.

[from Poetry, Violence, and the Trembling Lambs, 1959]

The only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication.

These media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.

The Poetics of the New American Poetry

Alice Notley

inchoate, I'm still always choked with bells

Lola Haskins

[from Lola Haskins's Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems, 2004]

For Someone Considering Death

I told you.
Life is one big Hanon
up and down the piano,
ten fingers skipping over each other
in every conceivable way,
two hands getting stronger.

And sure,
the notes are the same for everyone,
but you can choose to whisper or shout,
to fade or grow.
And haven't you noticed that some people's hands sing,
but others are Midwestern on the keys,
each crescendo a secretarial swell.

Think about this.
How can you dream to play the Pathetique,
how can the moment come to truly look
into someone's eyes
and say,The hell with everything, I love you,
when you haven't done your time,
hour after hour, year after year
in that small closed room.

Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems (American Poets Continuum)

Muddy Prints, Water Shine

You can pre-order my chapbook, Muddy Prints, Water Shine from Finishing Line Press. Free shipping until 03/28/08.

Samuel Beckett

[from Samuel Beckett's Echo's Bones, 1935]

Sanies I

all the livelong way this day of sweet showers from Portrane on the
      seashore
Donabate sad swans of Turvey Swords
pounding along in three ratios like a sonata
like a Ritter with pommelled scrotum atra cura on the step
Botticelli from the fork down pestling the transmission
tires bleeding voiding zeep the highway
all heaven in the sphincter
the sphincter

müüüüüüüde now
potwalloping now through the promenaders
this trusty all-steel this super-real
bound for home like a good boy
where I was born with a pop with the green of the larches
ah to be back in the caul now with no trusts
no fingers no spoilt love
belting along in the meantime clutching the bike
the billows of the nubile the cere wrack
pot-valient caulless waisted in rags hatless
for mamma papa chicken and ham
warm Grave too say the word
happy days snap the stem shed a tear
this day Spy Wedsday seven pentades past
oh the larches the pain drawn like a cork
the glans ho took the day off up hill and down dale
with a ponderous fawn from the Liverpool London and Globe
back the shadows lengthen the sycamores are sobbing
to roly-poly oh to me a spanking boy
buckets of fizz childbed is thirsty work
for the midwife he is gory
for the proud parent he washes down a gob of gladness
for footsore Achates also he pants his pleasure
sparkling beestings for me
tired now hair ebbing gums ebbing ebbing home
good as gold now in the prime after a brief prodigality
yea and suave
suave urbane beyond good and evil
biding my time without rancour you may take your oath
distraught half-crooked courting the sneers of these fauns these
      smart nymphs
clipped like a pederast as to one trouser-end
sucking in my bloated lantern behind a Wild Woodbine
cinched to death in a filthy slicker
flinging the proud Swift forward breasting the swell of Stürmers
I see main verb at last
her whom alone in the accusative
I have dismounted to love
gliding towards me dauntless nautch-girl on the face of the waters
dauntless daughter of desires in the old black and flamingo
get along with you now take the six the seven the eight or the little
      single-decker
take a bus for all I care walk cadge a lift
home to the cob of your web in Holles Street
and let the tiger go on smiling
in our hearts that funds ways home

Collected Poems in English & French

Troy Jollimore

[from Troy Jollimore's Tom Thomson in Purgatory, 2006]

Tobekobekon

The feelings you thought were genuine
were purchased at a discount
from a supplier
in a city with a name something like
Tobekobekon, Ohio.
A city where there are more cafés
than people, and residents gather
under the eaves of the bridge which connects them
with their sister city
in New jersey.
In these small gropus they confess their sins,
passing cigarettes in circles.
My supplier was a kind man
who kept a large family
and whose irrational attraction
to large sea mammals
would lead to his untimely demise.
I am telling you this
so you will know what it is
that wakes me at four every morning,
wanting you
more than drugs, or sleep, or peace.


Roses Inverted

The roses that grow in that stony ground
send their roots straight up, and their blossoms down.

Their sun-seeking roots anchor them in the air,
but they find neither water nor nourishment there.

Their leaves stretch toward the planet's hot core.
But the earth's inner engine radiates more

heat than it does light, so that, to their surprise,
they find that they cannot photosynthesize.

They are white as milk. Up among the stones,
the pale roots linger like the half-buried bones

of abandoned camels licked clean by the sands.
Yet the underground flowers that open like hands

are brazen and bright. They unfurl like flags.
Among the miniature caverns and crags

just beneath the surface, these banners gather,
sheltered from sun, from stars, from weather —

sheltered, too, from admirers; hidden from any
appreciative eye. And there are so many!

They are thoughts we attempted to utter, but failed.
Or confessions of love: folded, stamped, never mailed.

Tom Thomson In Purgatory

Ron Padgett

[from Ron Padgett's How to Be Perfect, 2007]

Mortal Combat

You can't tell yourself not to think
of the English muffin because that's what
you just did, and now the idea
of the English muffin has moved
to your salivary glands and caused
a ruckus. But I am more powerful
than you, salivary glands, stronger
than you, idea, and able to leap
over you, thoughts that keep coming
like an invading army trying to pull
me away from who I am. I am
a squinty old fool stooped over
his keyboard having an anxiety attack
over an English muffin! And
that's the way I like it.

How to Be Perfect

Harriet Monroe's Poetry

We have learned from Ron Silliman that the first ten years of Poetry are now online.

Philip Levine

[from Philip Levine's Not This Pig, 1968]

Animals Are Passing from Our Lives

It's wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I'm to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won't meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes

that any moment I'll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,
or that I'll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

Not This Pig: Poems (Wesleyan Poetry Program)

Susan Mitchell

[from Susan Mitchell's The Water Inside the Water, 1983]

Once, Driving West of Billings, Montana

I ran into the afterlife.
No fluffy white clouds. Not even stars. Only sky
dark as the inside of a movie theater
at three in the afternoon and getting bigger all the time,
expanding at terrific speed
over the car which was disappearing,
flattening out empty
as the fields on either side.

                                      It was impossible to think
under that rain louder than engines.
I turned off the radio to listen, let my head
fill up until every bone
was vibrating — sky.

                            Twice, trees of lightning
broke out of the asphalt. I could smell
the highway burning. Long after, saw blue smoke twirling
behind the eyeballs, lariats
doing fancy rope tricks, jerking silver
dollars out of the air, along with billiard cues, ninepins.

I was starting to feel I could drive forever
when suddenly one of those trees was right in front of me.
Of course, I hit it —
branches shooting stars down the windshield,
poor car shaking like a dazed cow.
I thought this time for sure I was dead
so whatever was on the other side had to be eternity.

Saw sky enormous as nowhere. Kept on driving.

The Water Inside the Water

Ellen Bryant Voigt

[from Ellen Bryant Voigt's Claiming Kin, 1976]

Tropics

In the still morning when you move
toward me in sleep for love,
I dream of

an island where long-stemmed cranes,
serious weather vanes,
turn slowly on one

foot. There the dragonfly folds
his mica wings and rides
the tall reed

close as a handle. The hippo yawns,
nods to thick pythons,
slack and drowsy, who droop down

like untied sashes
from the trees. The brash
hyenas do not cackle

and run but lie with their paws
on their heads like dogs.
The lazy crow's caw

falls like a sigh. In the field
below, the fat moles build
their dull passage with an old

instinct that needs
no light or waking; its slow beat
turns the hand in sleep

as we turn toward each other
in the ripe air of summer,
before the change of weather,

before the heavy drop
of the apples.

Claiming Kin (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Elizabeth Spires

[from Elizabeth Spires's Now the Green Blade Rises, 2002]

The Papermaker

          Last year's poverty was not yet true poverty.
          This year's poverty is at last true poverty.
          Last year there was nowhere to place the gimlet.
          This year the gimlet itself is gone.
                               — ZEN MONK HSIANG-YEN

In the hot heat of deep summer,
I dream of paper white as snow,
white winter paper,
drying in the hills.

The days repeat.
Each sheet is the first sheet,
alive, without ego, still,
until the poet speaks.

Here is the white field.
Here is the white field, waiting.
A black brush, a crow,
walks there, flies off.

What do I know?
The I disappearing
is the crow flying,
the clumsy crow.

Sweating, I wake,
holding nothing in my hands.
Again, I have dreamed
the dream of paper.

And what, you patiently ask,
is true poverty?
This sheet that I give you
upon which nothing is written.

Now the Green Blade Rises: Poems

Lisa Williams

Lisa Williams in the February issue of Poetry.

Stanley Plumly

[from Stanley Plumly's Old Heart, 2007]

The Woman Who Shoveled the Sidewalk

She clearly needed more than money,
which, anyway, wasn't much.
Her dog, one of those outlawed fighting breeds,
black-and-white and eyes too far apart,
kept snapping at the leash, the cash
I placed as simply as I could into her open hand.
Her small stalled car was what she lived in,
the death seat and backseat all-purposed into piles.
She was desperate so she blessed me.
I could almost feel my mother standing there,
the way she'd greet the lost after the war.
A woman vulnerable is powerful.
Poverty in all the texts grants grace
to the raveled and unwashed,
just as the soul we assign to what is singing
in the trees, even in winter, lives
in the face and voice of the least.
You could see the random child in her,
who had got, today, this far.
You could hear, under her words, silence.
There wasn't that much snow, enough
to take its picture if you left it untouched.
Her companionable, hostile dog was what she had,
who stayed in the car while she started in earnest,
as if the work were wages. Young, off
or still on drugs — I couldn't tell —
she was alone in every hard detail.
Each day is lifted, then put back down.
Tomorrow's snow turns back into the rain.
I had to be somewhere but knew when
I got home she'd be gone. And the walk,
from start to finish, would be clean.

Old Heart: Poems

Edward Taylor

[Edward Taylor, 1682, from The English Poetry Database]

Thy Good Ointment

How sweet a Lord is mine? If any should
Guarded, Engarden'd, nay, Imbosomd bee
In reechs of Odours, Gales of Spices, Folds
Of Aromaticks, Oh! how sweet was hee?
He would be sweet, and yet his sweetest Wave
Compar'de to thee my Lord, no Sweet would have.

A Box of Ointments, broke; sweetness most sweet.
A surge of spices: Odours Common Wealth,
A Pillar of Perfume: a steaming Reech
Of Aromatick Clouds: All Saving Health.
Sweetness itselfe thou art: And I presume
In Calling of thee Sweet, who art Perfume.

But Woe is mee! who have so quick a Sent
To Catch perfumes pufft out from Pincks, and Roses
And other Muscadalls, as they get Vent,
Out of their Mothers Wombs to bob our noses.
And yet thy sweet perfume doth seldom latch
My Lord, within my Mammulary Catch.

Am I denos'de? or doth the Worlds ill sents
Engarison my nosthrills narrow bore?
Or is my smell lost in these Damps it Vents?
And shall I never finde it any more?
Or is it like the Hawks, or Hownds whose breed
Take stincking Carrion for Perfume indeed?

This is my Case. All things smell sweet to mee:
Except thy sweetness, Lord. Expell these damps.
Breake up this Garison: and let me see
Thy Aromaticks pitching in these Camps.
Oh! let the Clouds of thy sweet Vapours rise,
And both my Mammularies Circumcise.

Shall Spirits thus my Mammularies suck?
(As Witches Elves their teats,) and draw from thee
My Dear, Dear Spirit after fumes of muck?
Be Dunghill Damps more sweet than Graces bee?
Lord, clear these Caves. These Passes take, and keep.
And in these Quarters lodge thy Odours sweet.

Lord, breake thy Box of Ointment on my Head;
Let thy sweet Powder powder all my hair:
My Spirits let with thy perfumes be fed
And make thy Odours, Lord, my nosthrills fare.
My Soule shall in thy sweets then soar to thee:
I'le be thy Love, thou my sweet Lord shalt bee.

Daisy Fried

[from Daisy Fried's My Brother Is Getting Arrested Again, 2006]

The Hawk

On July 21, 2005, Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz (D., Pa.) voted for a bill to extend the Patriot Act for another 10 years. President Bush hailed the vote.

From the playground's biggest tree's biggest branch
the hawk through daylight drops to the monkeybars
top deck, claws sunk in plunder. The hawk
shakes its gray-brown feathers, leans, with its beak
unzips the little squirrel suit, probes into the hot mess.
Nothing bothers it. The raincoated tourist grabs
his wife's wrist knobs, gabbles a strange language,
transfixed by the bird, and the scaly foot closes down.
A mom clamps her hand over the eyes of her kid,
his face so small her hand covers it. She hustles him
bellowing away; he wrenches at her fingers,
will break them, will, if he can, to see. Watchers
gasp, groan, video. "I love this," a man whispers,
hands in his suit pockets. "I'm a hunter but I never
get to hunt anymore, so I love this!" The hawk
from the carcass extracts a bit of bloody intestine.
Flips it long, thin, looplike, over his beak. A gewgaw.
Tilts, eats. Gets another. Loops and eats again.

My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (Pitt Poetry Series)

Elizabeth Spires

[from Elizabeth Spires's "Falling Away" in Annonciade, 1989]

The early morning snowfall has put all of us in a dreamy, slow-motion mood, everyone, that is, except for our teacher, a study in black and white, dressed in a heavy black habit and black veil, white wimple, collar, and bib. A crucifix hangs from a black rope belt knotted around her waist; she has told us that if she holds it and sincerely repents her sins at the moment of death, her soul will fly straight to heaven.

Sister M——— points outside with her long wooden pointer, the same pointer that often comes down with a crack! on the desks of unsuspecting daydreamers, bringing them back to this world with a start. Outside, each snowflake is lost in the indistinguishable downward spiral of the heavy snowfall. The voice that is not a voice comes back, her voice, imagined, reconstructed from memory: How many souls in hell? More than all the snowflakes that are falling today, yesterday, tomorrow. I try to imagine a number that large, an infinite number, and cannot. Then I try to follow the path of one individual snowflake in its slow, yet inevitable, drifting descent, but lose it in the swirling pattern of white against white.

The lesson continues: How long will those lost souls pay for their sins? For all eternity. Eternity. How can we, at eleven years old, she must be thinking, possibly be able to conceive of just how long eternity is? Imagine the largest mountain in the world, made of solid rock. Once every hundred years, a bird flies past, the tip of its wing brushing lightly against the mountaintop. Eternity is as long as it would take for the bird's wing to wear the mountain down to nothing.

Ever after, I connect hell and eternity not with fire and flames, but with something cold and unchanging, a snowy tundra overshadowed by a huge granite mountain that casts a pall over the landscape. Like the North or South Pole in midsummer, the sun would circle overhead in a crazy loop, day passing into day without intervening night, each object nakedly illuminated, etched sharply in light and shadow, unable to retreat into night's invisibility. If I were unlucky, I'd be there one day, for forever, dressed in my white communion dress, white anklets, and black patent leather shoes.

Annonciade (Poets, Penguin)

Marvin Bell

[from Marvin Bell's Mars Being Red, 2007]

Days of Superman

He can't help it about umbrellas, you'd think
they were rubberized splatters but to him are
spring-loaded popguns that shoot the rain.
This is childhood when an egg's so perfect,
so ideal, you have to crack it, and a milk bottle
is as full of feeling as mother's dress. He's a yarn
to relate of a rake and a leaf pile, of the circular
mysteries of a desk globe, how the Popsicle
man's wagon rang the day, and once a knife
sprang from its sheath and frightened the air.
He saw himself a coal, on its way to glass
or diamond, and his purple thumb his favorite
because the handsome hammer had chosen it.

Mars Being Red

David Leavitt

David Leavitt's recent novel, The Indian Clerk, is long, mathematical, and splendid.

Michael Ondaatje

[from Michael Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, 1976]

I take off and wail long notes jerking the squawk into the end of them to form a new beat, have to trust them all as I close my eyes, know the others are silent, throw the notes off the walls of people, the iron lines, so pure and sure bringing the howl down to the floor and letting in the light and the girl is alone now mirroring my throat in her lonely tired dance, the street silent but for us her tired breath I can hear for she's near me as I go round and round in the centre of the Liberty-Iberville connect. Then silent. For something's fallen in my body and I can't hear the music as I play it. The notes more often now. She hitting each note with her body before it is even out so I know what I do through her. God this is what I wanted to play for, if no one else I always guessed there would be this, this mirror somewhere, she closer to me now and her eyes over mine tough and young and come from god knows where. Never seen her before but testing me taunting me to make it past her, old hero, old ego tested against one as cold and pure as himself, this tall bitch breasts jumping loose under the light shirt she wears that's wet from energy and me fixing them with the aimed horn tracing up to the throat. Half dead, can't take more, hardly hit the squawks anymore but when I do my body flicks at them as if I'm the dancer till the music is out there. Roar. It comes back now, so I can hear only in waves now and then, god the heat in the air, she is sliding round and round her thin hands snake up through her hair and do their own dance and she is seven foot tall with them and I aim at them to bring them down to my body and the music gets caught in her hair, this is what I wanted, always, loss of privacy in the playing, leaving the stage, the rectangle of band on the street, this hearer who can throw me in the direction and the speed she wishes like an angry shadow.

Coming Through Slaughter

reading on Pawley's Island

I will read poems from my chapbook, Muddy Prints, Water Shine, and newer work at the Waccamaw Center for Higher Education, 160 Willbrook Boulevard, Pawley's Island, SC, on March 27, 2008 at 3 PM as part of the Tea and Poetry Series. The event is free to the public. Call 843-349-4032 for further information.

George Seferis

[from George Seferis, Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, 1995]

The Cats of Saint Nicholas

       But deep inside me sings
       the Fury's lyreless threnody;
       my heart, self-taught, has lost
       the precious confidence of hope . . .
                            Aeschylus, "Agamemnon"

'That's the Cape of Cats ahead,' the captain said to me,
pointing through the mist to a low stretch of shore,
the beach deserted; it was Christmas day —
'. . . and there, in the distance to the west, is where
Aphrodite rose out of the waves;
they call the place "Greek's Rock."
Left ten degrees rudder!'
She had Salome's eyes, the cat I lost a year ago;
and old Ramazan, how he would look death square in the eyes,
whole days long in the snow of the East,
under the frozen sun,
days long square in the eyes: the young hearth god.
Don't stop, traveller.
'Left ten degrees rudder,' muttered the helmsman.

. . . my friend, though, might well have stopped,
now between ships,
shut up in a small house with pictures,
searching for windows behind the frames.
The ship's bell struck
like a coin from some vanished city
that brings to mind, as it falls,
alms from another time.
'It's strange,' the captain said.
'That bell — given what day it is —
reminded me of another, the monastery bell.
A monk told me the story,
a half-mad monk, a kind of dreamer.

'It was during the great drought,
forty years without rain,
the whole island devastated,
people died and snakes were born.
This cape had millions of snakes
thick as a man's legs
and full of poison.
In those days the monastery of St Nicholas
was held by the monks of St Basil,
and they couldn't work their fields,
couldn't put their flocks to pasture.
In the end they were saved by the cats they raised.
Every day at dawn a bell would strike
and an army of cats would move into battle.
They'd fight the day long,
until the bell sounded for the evening feed.
Supper done, the bell would sound again
and out they'd go to battle through the night.
They say it was a marvellous sight to see them,
some lame, some blind, others missing
a nose, an ear, their hides in shreds.
So to the sound of four bells a day
months went by, years, season after season.
Wildly obstinate, always wounded,
they annihilated the snakes but in the end disappeared;
they just couldn't take in that much poison.
Like a sunken ship
they left no trace on the surface:
not a miaow, not a bell even.
Steady as you go!
Poor devils, what could they do,
fighting like that day and night, drinking
the poisonous blood of those snakes?
Generations of poison, centuries of poison.'
'Steady as you go,' indifferently echoed the helmsman.

                                    Wednesday, 5 February, 1969

George Seferis: Collected Poems

Geoffrey Young

[from Geoffrey Young's The Riot Act, 2008; I first read Geoffrey Young's work at Ron Silliman's blog]

No Single Effort

No single effort captures the essence of the human condition. But the completion of any day's writing adds its particular brush with experience to the master list of competing versions, even if no one reads it for a thousand years.

Why?

Because the time is ripe. We are still green. I look in vain for adults. Nothing but kids on this watch. Six or seven feet tall. Hard to discipline. A good sign in growing boys? Tell me a myth I haven't heard.

The lake of the mind stores wetness. Drying up is our worst enemy. For a person in my shorts I can imagine nothing worse.

It takes a meadowlark in a field. It takes a futon in a loft.

How much time do we have. How much face. You know more than I do. Three chords worth. I've never seen such music.

Call it a self-knockout.

Will Prospero set us free?

A black line traps the image. We suffer people too much. Grainy landscape with noon train. Roll the credits.



Turning Pages

Benny "Kid" Peret fluttered
against the ropes
like a titmouse beating his wings in cream
while Emile Griffith the Donatello of the Hotel Champion

pummeled the Kid with smashed potatoes and fireball
jabs, and we leaped off the king-size bed
yelling "Stop it! Stop the fight! He's out on his feet"
to the referee who didn't see it

as Griffith's fists loosened the head
of the Kid from its spinal axis until
finally the leather that was shaping it
could have been fingers turning

pages of a windblown book
no one will ever read again.

Riot Act

Muddy Prints, Water Shine

You can pre-order my chapbook, Muddy Prints, Water Shine from Finishing Line Press. Free shipping until 03/28/08.

Dusie

Thank you DIY Poetry Publishing Collective for this link to Dusie issue 7, which contains 60 electronic chapbooks.

Fanny Howe

[the final section of "Forty Days" from Fanny Howe's The Lyrics, 2007]

29.

Call out.
Press nine.

I will hear some shift of gray in the air.
Will ingest the frost of its silence.

A six-foot bed
And a sprawler's sigh through the wall

Of this fifty-pound hotel
Occupied by the dropped.



Call out, no call back.

Fall fast forward without will
To the window.

The other world is pressed
Against the glass:

A kind of heaven, a known nothing.

Call out to the cone-opening light
To colors never seen before

But most familiar.



Call out of the grit in your tissue
Before your days are written

Or you will be too late for the answer.

Be really primitive.
A thin finger picture

Of nature undernurtured.

Like egg, parchment, glue and the breath of the artist.



Call come in at last
Immaterial

When or where
A message from that.

I will be packed into people
Against a strange tin.

Vehicles will glitter
And polyphony the interrupter

Will cut every sentence in half.

Call I won't call back.
Call up into the night.

"Knower, how is this voice different from the others?"

The Lyrics: Poems

Alice Friman

At 7 PM on Friday February 8 Alice Friman will read at the Second Presbyterian Church in Charleston for the Poetry Society of South Carolina.

The poem below was my knock-you-back introduction to Alice.

[from The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2004]

Waiting

Life isn't long enough
to learn the patience necessary.
Pitted against desire, what's so hot about
counting to ten? Think salmon — the fight,
the desperate fling
                           against the bear's
swipe and the knock-you-back water.
In the face of need, let's face it,
patience is luxury. Even Beauty,
sensible, yes, but come first thaw
she too is cruising for the hook.
No lure, no worm, no hand-tied fly
but whooped up already, ready to thrash
gasping in the bilge of any boat.
                                             One ogle,
one polished line, one invitation into
the tangoed dark, and there it is — the red
slam-dunk of the heart, that timpani
in the chest counting out
the clarinet's twiddle and each thin
thought of the violin, wanting only
the great drama it was tightened up for.
The big BIM BAM.
                         Listen, the heart
wants what it wants. There's no telling
it different. Look out the window.
The curtain rises, and stage left — see?
Spring enters singing forsythia, that aria
of yellow, that operatic bush.

Miroslav Holub

[from Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers edited by Charles Simic and Mark Strand, 1985]

Suffering [excerpt]

But I ask no questions,
       no one asks any questions,
Because it's all quite useless,
Experiments succeed and experiments fail,
Like everything else in this world,
       in which truth advances
       like some splendid silver bulldozer
       in the tumbling darkness

Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers

Ralph Waldo Emerson

[from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal, July 21, 1837]

Courage consists in the conviction that they with whom you contend are no more than you. If we believed in the existence of strict individuals, natures, that is, not radically identical but unknown, immeasurable, we should never dare to fight.

Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1836-1838: With Annotations

Dante Alighieri

[from Canto V of Dante Alighieri's Purgatorio, translated by Jean and Robert Hollander]

"Perché l'animo tuo tanto s'impiglia?"
disse 'l maestro, "che l'andare allenti?
che ti fa ciò che quivi si pispiglia?

Vien dientro a me, e lascia dir le genti:
sta come torre ferma, che no crolla
già mai la cima per soffiar di venti;

ché sempre l'omo in cui pensier rampolla
sovra pensier, da sé dilunga il segno,
perché la foga l'un de l'altro insolla."

Che potea io ridir, se non "Io vegno"?

—

'Is your mind so distracted,' asked the master,
'that you have slowed your pace?
Why do you care what they are whispering?

'Just follow me and let the people talk.
Be more like a sturdy tower
that does not tremble in the fiercest wind.

'For any man who lets one thought --
and then another -- take him over
will soon lose track of his first goal.'

What could I answer but 'I come?'

Purgatorio

Wislawa Szymborska

[from Wislawa Szymborska's Monologue of a Dog, translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak, 2006]

Puddles

I remember that childhood fear well,
I avoided puddles,
especially fresh ones, after showers.
One of them might be bottomless, after all,
even though it looks just like the rest.

I'll step and suddenly be swallowed whole,
I'll start rising downwards
then even deeper down
towards the reflected clouds
and maybe farther.

Then the puddle will dry up,
shut above me,
I'm trapped for good -- where --
with a shout that never made it to the surface.

Understanding came only later:
not all misadventures
fit within the world's laws
and even if they wanted to,
they couldn't happen.

Monologue of a Dog

Joseph Brodsky

[from Joseph Brodsky's Less Than One: Selected Essays, 1986]

art, especially poetry, differs from any other form of psychological activity precisely because in it everything -- form, content, and the very spirit of the work -- is picked out by ear. . . . verse meter is the equivalent of a certain psychological state, at times not of just one state but of several. The poet "picks" his way toward the spirit of a work by means of the meter.

The above by no means signifies intellectual irresponsibility. Exactly the opposite is the case: rational enterprise -- choice, selection -- is entrusted to hearing, or (putting it more clumsily but more accurately) is focused into hearing.

. . . it is the second, and not the first, line that shows where your poem is to go metrically. It also informs an experienced reader as to the identity of the author, i.e., whether he is American or British (an American second line, normally, is quite bold: it violates the preconceived music of the meter with its linguistic content; a Briton, normally, tends to sustain the tonal predictability of the second line, introducing his own diction only in the third, or, more likely, in the fourth line. Compare the tetrametric -- or even pentametric -- jobs of Thomas Hardy with E. A. Robinson, or better still, with Robert Frost). More importantly, though, the second line is the line that introduces the rhyme scheme.

. . . in a poem, you should try to reduce the number of adjectives to a minimum. So that if somebody covers your poem with a magic cloth that removes adjectives, the page will still be black enough because of nouns, adverbs, and verbs. When that cloth is little, your best friends are nouns. Also, never rhyme the same parts of speech. Nouns you can, verbs you shouldn't, and rhyming adjectives is taboo.

. . . Whenever you are going to use something pejorative, try to apply it to yourself to get the full measure of the word. Otherwise your criticism may amount simply to getting unpleasant things out of your system.

. . . A stanza, you see, is a self-generating device: the end of one spells the necessity of another. This necessity is first of all purely acoustical and, only then, didactical (although one shouldn't try to divorce them, especially for the sake of analysis). The danger here is that the preconceived music of a recurrent stanzaic pattern tends to dominate or even determine the content. And it's extremely hard for a poet to fight the dictates of the tune.

The eleven-line-long stanza of "September 1, 1939," is, as far as I can tell, Auden's own invention, and the irregularity of its rhyme pattern functions as an anti-fatigue device. Note that. All the same, the quantitative effect of an eleven-line-long stanza is such that the first thing on the writer's mind as he starts a new one is to escape from the musical predicament of the preceding lines.

Less Than One: Selected Essays