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