Jack Spicer

[from Jack Spicer's The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack SpicerThe House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, ed. Peter Gizzi, Wesleyan, 1998]

ET: At what point did you allow these messages to take over or start happening in your poetry?

JS: It happened about halfway through when I was writing After Lorca, when the letters to Lorca started coming and being dictated and the poems, instead of being translations, were dictated. Then I sort of knew what was happening. And when the final thing happened, in the poem, the business of the last letter, I really knew that there was something moving it. Before, I never did. I just had the big thing of you writing poems and isn't that great, and they were sometimes great, sometimes good at least. But after that I never really had any ambitions to do anything else.

Robert Duncan

[from Robert Duncan's Selected Poems: Revised and Enlarged, ed. Robert J. Bertholf, New Directions, 1997]

The Song of the Borderguard

The man with his lion under the shed of wars

sheds his belief as if he shed tears.

The sound of words waits —

a barbarian host at the borderline of sense.

The enamord guards desert their posts

harkening to the lion-smell of a poem

that rings in their ears.

       — Dreams, a certain guard said —

            were never designd so

            to re-arrange an empire.

            Along about six o’clock I take out my guitar

            and sing to a lion

            who sleeps like a line of poetry

            in the shed of wars.

The man shedding his belief

knows that the lion is not asleep,

does not dream, is never asleep,

is a wide-awake poem

waiting like a lover for the disrobing of the guard;

the beautiful boundaries of the empire

naked, rapt round in the smell of a lion.

(The barbarians have passt over the significant phrase)

       — When I was asleep,

            a certain guard says,

       a man shed his clothes as if he shed tears

       and appeard as a lonely lion

       waiting for a song under the shed-roof of wars.

I sang the song that he waited to hear,

I, the Prize-Winner, the Poet-Acclaimed.

Dear, Dear, Dear, Dear, I sang,

believe, believe, believe, believe.

The shed of wars is splendid as the sky,

houses our waiting like a pure song

housing in its words the lion-smell

         of the beloved disrobed.

I sang: believe, believe, believe.

          I the guard because of my guitar

believe. I am the certain guard,

certain of the Beloved, certain of the Lion,

certain of the Empire. I with my guitar.

Dear, Dear, Dear, Dear, I sing.

I, the Prize-Winner, the Poet on Guard.

The borderlines of sense in the morning light

are naked as a line of poetry in a war.

slipper sweat

slipper sweat

heel
       a toe
               sliding

Lorine Niedecker

[from Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, University of California, 2002]

So this was I

in my framed

young aloofness

unsuspecting

               what I filled

eager to remain

a smooth blonde cool

effect of light

an undiffused good take,

               a girl

               who couldn’t bake

How I wish

I had someone to give

this pretty thing to

who’d keep it —

               something of me

               would shape

Robert Creeley

[from an interview with Robert Creeley in David Ossman's The Sullen Art: Interviews with Modern American Poets, Corinth, 1963]

In the earlier poems . . . the emotional terms are very difficult. The poems come from a context that was difficult to live in, and so I wanted the line to be used to register that kind of problem, or that kind of content. Elsewhere I remember I did say that "Form is never more than an extension of content," and by that I meant that the thing to be said will, in that way, determine how it will be said. So that if you're saying, "Go light the fire," "fire" in that registration will have one kind of emphasis, and if you start screaming, "Fire! Fire!" of course that will have another. In other words, the content of what is semantically involved will very much function in how the statement of it occurs. Now the truncated line, or the short, seemingly broken line I was using in my first poems, comes from the somewhat broken emotions that were involved in them. Now, as I begin to relax, as I not so much grow older, but more settled, more at ease in my world, the line can not so much grow softer, but can become . . . more lyrical, less afraid of concluding. And rhyme, of course, is to me a balance not only of sounds, but a balance which implies agreement. That's why, I suppose, I'd stayed away from rhymes in the early poems except for this kind of ironic throwback on what was being said.

Kedrick James

[from Kedrick James's Poet, Pirate, Netbot, Vizpo]

we acquire a new skill . . . obliteracy . . . the ability to make the apparent texts transparent to varying degrees. We disregard more assiduously than we attend . . . all information carries with it a catalytic energy, no matter how insignificant . . . The residue of excess information, its reverberations . . . add character to the gleaning of meaning . . . learning is being reinvented . . .

Knowledge is played on the hegemonica.

Lorine Niedecker

[from Lorine Niedecker's Collected Works, University of California, 2002]

Will You Write Me a Christmas Poem

Will I!

The mad stimulus of Gay Gaunt Day
meet to put holly on a tree
and trim green bells
and trim green bells

Now candles come to faces.
Your are wrong to-day
you are wrong to-day,
my dear. My dear —

One translucent morning
in the development of winter
one fog to move a city backward —
Backward, backwards, backward!

You see the objects and the movable fingers,
Candy dripping from branches,
Horoscopes of summer
and you don't have Christmas ultimately —
Ultima Thule ultimately!

Spreads and whimpets
Good to the cherry drops,
Whom for a splendor
Whom for a splendor

I'm going off the paper I'm going off the pap-

Send two birds out
Send two birds out
And carol them in,
Cookies go round.

What a scandal is Christmas,
What a scandle Christmas is,
a red stick-up
to a lily.

You flagellate my woes, you flagellate,
I interpret yours,
holly is a care divine
                holly is a care divine

and where are we all from here.
Drink for there is nothing else to do
but pray,
And where are we all from here.

Throw out the ribbons
and tie your people in
All spans dissever
once the New Year opens
and snow derides
a doorway,
its spasms dissever

All spans dissever,
Wherefore we, for instance, recuperate
no grief to modulate
no grief to modulate
Wherefore we, Free instance

The Christmas cacophony
one word to another,
sound of gilt trailing the world
slippers to presume,
postludes, homicles, sweet tenses
imbecile and corrupt, —
     failing the whirled, trailing the whirled

This great eventual heyday
to plenty the hour thereof,
fidelius.
Heyday! Hey-day! Hey-day!

I fade the color of my wine
that an afternoon might live
foiled with shine and brittle
I fade the color of my wine

Harmony in Egypt,
representative birthday.
Christ what a destiny
What a destiny's Christ's, Christ!

Robert Creeley

[from Robert Creeley's The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley: 1945-1975], University of California, 2006]

For Fear

For fear I want
to make myself again
under the thumb
of old love, old time

subservience
and pain, bent
into a nail that will
not come out.

Why, love, does it
make such a difference
not to be heard
in spite of self

or what we may feel,
one for the other,
but as a hammer
to drive again

bent nail
into old hurt?

Edward Dorn

[from Edward Dorn's Way More West, Penguin, 2007]

Like a Message on Sunday

Sits
the forlorn plumber
by the river
with his daughter
       staring at the water
then, at her
his daughter closely.

Once World, he came
to our house to fix the stove
                     and couldn't
   oh, we were arrogant and talked
about him in the next room, doesn't
a man know what he is doing?

Can't it be done right,
            World of iron thorns.
Now they sit by the meagre river
by the water . . . stare
into that plumber
so that I can see a daughter in the water
she thin and silent
he wearing a baseball cap
       in a celebrating town this summer season
may they live on

on, may their failure be kindly, and come
in small pieces.

John Ashbery

[from John Ashbery's Houseboat Days, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977]

Syringa

Orpheus liked the glad personal quality
Of the things beneath the sky. Of course, Eurydice was a part
Of this. Then one day, everything changed. He rends
Rocks into fissures with lament. Gullies, hummocks
Can't withstand it. The sky shudders from one horizon
To the other, almost ready to give up wholeness.
Then Apollo quietly told him: "Leave it all on earth.
Your lute, what point? Why pick at a dull pavan few care to
Follow, except a few birds of dusty feather,
Not vivid performances of the past." But why not?
All other things must change too.
The seasons are no longer what they once were,
But it is the nature of things to be seen only once,
As they happen along, bumping into other things, getting along
Somehow. That's where Orpheus made his mistake.
Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn't turned around.
No use standing there like a gray stone toga as the whole wheel
Of recorded history flashes past, struck dumb, unable to utter an
       intelligent
Comment on the most thought-provoking element in its train.
Only love stays on the brain, and something these people,
These other ones, call life. Singing accurately
So that the notes mount straight up out of the well of
Dim noon and rival the tiny, sparkling yellow flowers
Growing around the brink of the quarry, encapsulates
The different weights of the things.
                                                      But it isn't enough
To just go on singing. Orpheus realized this
And didn't mind so much about his reward being in heaven
After the Bacchantes had torn him apart, driven
Half out of their minds by his music, what it was doing to them.
Some say it was for his treatment of Eurydice.
But probably the music had more to do with it, and
The way music passes, emblematic
Of life and how you cannot isolate a note of it
And say it is good or bad. You must
Wait till it's over. "The end crowns all,"
Meaning also that the "tableau"
Is wrong. For although memories, of a season, for example,
Melt into a single snapshot, one cannot guard, treasure
That stalled moment. It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this. Then in the lowering gentian sky
Electric twitches are faintly apparent first, then burst forth
Into a shower of fixed, cream-colored flares. The horses
Have each seen a share of the truth, though each thinks,
"I'm a maverick. Nothing of this is happening to me,
Though I can understand the language of birds, and
The itinerary of lights caught in the storm is fully apparent to me.
Their jousting ends in music much
As trees move more easily in the wind after a summer storm
And is happening in lacy shadows of shore-trees, now, day after day."

But how late to be regretting all this, even
Bearing in mind that regrets are always late, too late!
To which Orpheus, a bluish cloud with white contours,
Replies that these are of course not regrets at all,
Merely a careful, scholarly setting down of
Unquestioned facts, a record of pebbles along the way.
And now matter how all this disappeared,
Or got where it was going, it is no longer
Material for a poem. Its subject
Matters too much, and not enough, standing there helplessly
While the poem streaked by, its tail afire, a bad
Comet screaming hate and disaster, but so turned inward
That the meaning, good or other, can never
Become known. The singer thinks
Constructively, builds up his chant in progressive stages
Like a skyscraper, but at the last minute turns away.
The song is engulfed in an instant in blackness
Which must in turn flood the whole continent
With blackness, for it cannot see. The singer
Must then pass out of sight, not even relieved
Of the evil burthen of the words. Stellification
Is for the few, and comes about much later
When all record of these people and their lives
Has disappeared into libraries, onto microfilm.
A few are still interested in them. "But what about
So-and-so?" is still asked on occasion. But they lie
Frozen and out of touch until an arbitrary chorus
Speaks of a totally different incident with a similar name
In whose tale are hidden syllables
Of what happened so long before that
In some small town, one indifferent summer.

Abe Louise Young

[Abe Louise Young from Hawaii Review]

Torn Screens

My mother is home with one breast, almost
sleep-walking. Three decades of mercury,
burning batteries, falling ash & all the plastic mysteries
compacted into garbage bags–

                   Trash incinerators
downriver are still stitching torn stockings of smoke
to the skyline, long legs of fire.
A boat’s a hat on house;
     a slab’s covered with underwear,

a cardinal pecks at a nest; the bag of birdseed molds,
& shudders to the other side
of the laundry room by sheer gyrations
of maggots.
            Sorry–
I know nothing; can’t laugh back.

We sit inside, eat General Tsao’s Chicken dripping
with syrup. Talk feral cats. Her sternum’s purple
& black. Her teeth are good, the crowns
are hanging on, though someone stole
her eyelashes.

Better have a baby
quick. Crazy laugh. And then she cries: her voice
is two tones deeper, dry, with the rattle of a hammer
dropped a long way down
the well.

Twenty years ago we caught rabbits
in the swamp that’s since turned iridescent green,
roped off with caution tape.
There’s an oil slick beautifying the lake.

The porch is falling down
     & once was screened
against mosquitoes but the screens got torn & now
are curtains sliced open in a swag,
night theater.

I kiss her cheek, she holds my hand.
We radiate together.

Steeds

1

Bolted. To the inner
arc of Cs

four legs.

Forth
back. Lunge-
powered young
equestrian

on the colt’s
home range.


2

       Thus
reels the

mounts — the buoyancy
of Palominos, of
Appaloosas —

thus

beneath the

surge of chords, of children
twirls itself
(as Appaloosas at
the wild toss

of
brass rings):

calliope.

Ted Berrigan

[from Ted Berrigan's The Collected Poems, University of California, 2005]

III

Stronger than alcohol, more great than song,
deep in whose reeds great elephants decay;
I, an island, sail, and my shores toss
on a fragrant evening, fraught with sadness
bristling hate.
It's true, I weep too much. Dawns break
slow kisses on the eyelids of the sea,
what other men sometimes have thought they've seen.
And since then I've been bathing in the poem
lifting her shadowy flowers up for me,
and hurled by hurricanes to a birdless place
the waving flags, nor pass by prison ships
O let me burst, and I be lost at sea!
and fall on my knees then, womanly.

Tom Clark

[from Tom Clark's Light & Shade: New and Selected Poems, Coffee House, 2006]

Radio

Don't hurt the radio for
Against all
Solid testimony machines
Have feelings
Too

Brush past it lightly
With a fine regard
For allowing its molecules
To remain 100% intact

Machines can think like Wittgenstein
And the radio's a machine
Thinking softly to itself
Of the Midnight Flower
As her tawny parts unfold

In slow motion the boat
Rocks on the ocean
As her tawny parts unfold

The radio does something mental
To itself singingly
As her tawny parts unfold
Inside its wires
And steal away its heart

Two minutes after eleven
The color dream communicates itself
The ink falls on the paper as if magically
The scalp falls away
A pain is felt
Deep in the radio

I take out my larynx and put it on the blue chair
And do my dance for the radio
It's my dance in which I kneel in front of the radio
And while remaining motionless elsewise
Force my eyeballs to come as close together as possible
While uttering a horrible and foreign word
Which I cannot repeat to you without now removing my larynx
And placing it on the blue chair

The blue chair isn't here
So I can't do that trick at the present time

The radio is thinking a few licks of its own
Pianistic thoughts attuned to tomorrow's grammar
Beautiful spas of seltzery coition
Plucked notes like sandpaper attacked by Woody Woodpecker

The radio says Edwardian farmers form Minnesota march on the Mafia
Armed with millions of radioactive poker chips

The radio fears foul play
It turns impersonal
A piggy bank was smashed
A victim was found naked
Radio how can you tell me this
In such a chipper tone

Your structure of voices is a friend
The best kind
The kind one can turn on or off
Whenever one wants to
But that is wrong I know
For you will intensely to continue
And in a deeper way
You do

Hours go by
And I watch you
As you diligently apply
A series of audible frequencies
To tiny receptors
Located inside my cranium
Resulting in much pleasure for someone
Who looks like me
Although he is seated about two inches to my left
And the both of us
Are listening to your every word
With a weird misapprehension
It's the last of the tenth
And Harmon Killebrew is up
With a man aboard

He blasts a game winning home run
The 559th of his career
But no one cares
Because the broadcast is studio-monitored for taping
To be replayed in 212 years

Heaven must be like this, radio
To not care about anything
Because it's all being taped for replay much later

Heaven must be like this
For as her tawny parts unfold
The small lights swim roseate
As if of sepals were the tarp made
As it is invisibly unrolled
And sundown gasps its old Ray Charles 45 of "Georgia"
Only through your voice

The Fish Trade

On board the Agua C
trailered to a Ford

a fisher, orange-bibbed
offloads fish

to a plastic bin
lifted gunwale high.

Water wets the road
the gutters run.

Ahi and marlin —
shining fins, scales, teeth —

cleaned and fileted, weighed
plastic-wrapped and priced.

So man fishes, so
fish die, so the man

sells fish so man can
eat. Forklift by Yale.

Ezra Pound

[from Ezra Pound's The Cantos, New Directions, 1993]

LII [excerpt]

Know then:
          Toward summer when the sun is in Hyades
Sovran is Lord of the Fire
            to this month are birds.
with bitter smell and with the odour of burning
To the hearth god, lungs of the victim
          The green frog lifts up his voice
            and the white latex is in flower
In red car with jewels incarnadine
          to welcome the summer
In this month no destruction
            no tree shall be cut at this time
Wild beasts are driven from field
          in this month are simples gathered.
The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven
          Then goes the sun into Gemini
Virgo in mid heaven at sunset
          indigo must not be cut
No wood burnt into charcoal
          gates are all open, no tax on the booths.
Now mares to go grazing,
            tie up the stallions
Post up the horsebreeding notices
            Month of the longest days
Life and death are now equal
            Strife is between light and darkness
Wise man stays in his house
            Stag droppeth antlers
Grasshopper is loud,
            leave no fire open to southward.
Now the sun enters Hydra, this is the third moon of summer
Antares of Scorpio stands mid heaven at sunset
Andromeda is with sunrise
            Lord of the fire is dominant
To this month is SEVEN,
            with bitter smell, with odour of burning
Offer to gods of the hearth
              the lungs of the victims
Warm wind is rising, cricket bideth in wall
Young goshawk is learning his labour
              dead grass breedeth glow-worms.
In Ming-T'ang HE bideth
              in the west wing of that house
Red car and the sorrel horses
              his banner incarnadine.
The fish ward now goes against crocodiles
To take all great lizards, turtles, for divination,
sea terrapin.
The lake warden to gather rushes
          to take grain for the manes
to take grain for the beasts you will sacrifice
to the Lords of the Mountains
          To the Lords of great rivers
Inspector of dye-works, inspector of colour and broideries
see that the white, black, green be in order
let no false colour exist here
black, yellow, green be of quality
            This month are trees in full sap
Rain has now drenched all the earth
            dead weeds enrich it, as if boil'd in a bouillon.
Sweet savour, the heart of the victim
yellow flag of Emperor's chariot
            yellow stones in his girdle.
Sagittarius in mid-course at sunset
            cold wind is beginning. Dew whitens.
Now is cicada's time,
          the sparrow hawk offers birds to the spirits.
Emperor goes out in war car, he is drawn by white horses,
white banner, white stones in his girdle
eats dog and the dish is deep.
            This month is the reign of Autumn
Heaven is active in metals, now gather millet
            and finish the flood-walls
Orion at sunrise.
            Horses now with black manes.
Eat dog meat. This is the month of ramparts.
Beans are the tribute. September is end of thunder
The hibernants go into their caves.
          Tolls lowered, now sparrows, they say, turn into oysters
The wolf now offers his sacrifice.
              Men hunt with five weapons,
They cut wood for charcoal.
            New rice with your dog meat.

Denise Levertov

[from Denise Levertov's Tesserae: Memories & Suppositions, New Directions, 1995]

The Sack Full of Wings

When my father was a little boy in Russia an old pedlar used to come by from time to time, carrying a big sack over his shoulder. Sometimes he would be seen in the streets and outlying districts of the town of Orsha, my father's home; sometimes when my father was taken to the larger city of Vitepsk to visit his grandparents and uncles, there again he would glimpse the pedlar, trudging along, always carrying the bulky sack. My father did not wonder what was in the sack, for he believed he knew: it was full of wings, wings which would enable people to fly like birds. (Of my father's great-grandfather, the Rav of Northern White Russia, it was told that although when young he had abjured the temptation to learn the language of birds, yet in old age he understood all that they said.)

When my father was ten years old another boy was born in Vitepsk who grew up to become a great and renowned painter: Marc Chagall. He and my father never knew one another, but Chagall depicted the old pedlar and his sack. He is flying, though not with wings. Perhaps the constant burden of such a concentration of wings was transmuted into the ability to levitate without stretching and flapping a single pair of them. At all events, it is clearly the same man, exactly as my father used to describe him when I was a child in London and he a middle-aged Anglican parson. I didn't discover until after my father's death in 1954 that Chagall had shared his recognition of the sack's magic.

nature poetry

Blogging on Harriet, Sina Queyras considers Til Lilburn and nature poetry

Your Elbow on a Car-Edge, Incognito As Summer

Your Elbow on a Car-Edge, Incognito As Summer

Draws me near to wonder
how grief

alters your wolf’s grin.

"The world’s a stage." No one

doubts the princess weeps for the king’s
              death (divined by the chorus), falls for
              the conquering lord.

Grape, apple, citrus, tea

these trinities of
nitrogen, phosphate, and sugar

                                              scribe

a chronicle histone-wound

like the Mahabharata.

Lyrics and melody
preview the roles we play

shooters and callers, dealers and spenders
the charmed ropes

unspooling.

Provincetown Crossing

My thanks to The Lyric's editor Jean Mellichamp Milliken and judge Erin Garstka for choosing my sonnet, "Provincetown Crossing," for a quarterly award.