Robin Blaser

[from Robin Blaser's “The Stadium of the Mirror” in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser, University of California, 2006]

The movement back of the great poets is not to a tradition — a golden time or wisdom behind us that places thought in the past and kills it — but it is toward a reopening of words — toward the violence and dynamism of Language — the work of it is in Pound’s return to Homer, Egypt, Na-Khi and in Olson’s ultimate return to Pleistocene, — his curriculum. A beginning again with everything. This reopening of words lets us see their solidifications — the crystals FORMing in the work — (a crust, akin to cruror — blood, Kryos — icy-cold, a coagulation that is the “external expression of a definite internal structure.” An open language is not a wise-doom. I have come to know how unpleasant it is to reveal the limitations and necessities of a practice in language where one is used to seeing . . . the expression of genius and freedom in all its transparency  (Foucault). I would not take it away from you, if it had not become the mirror of our deadness. Half under its breath, amid the murmuring of things, all experience is interiorized language. I (we) lose the words because the structure of what I (we) thought closed. There is nonetheless a speaking that lodges within my own speech. I would not give you the malicious grace of an esprit libre,  if the interior life were not an interiorized language (Lacan). The mind is only the body’s invisibility (Merleau-Ponty). The language regards the guilty man as he who it was (Curtius). . . .

Through the arrangement of words (parataxis), there is a speech alongside my speech, which allows a double speech. A placement. The Other is present and primary to our speaking. There is no public realm without such polarity of language. The operation of its duplicity is the poetic job. A peril and an ecstasy. The traffic around a heart that is heartless. The characters do not speak only of themselves, since they are images of an action. Transcendence is not a position somewhere else, but the manner of our being to any other (Merleau-Ponty). A co-existence

So, an operational Language — just where I (we) had thought to find the stable forms, the recognition that it is only ourselves. These closed words stop and become empty. They are then, where we were thinking, unstable and invaded, as if the known and thought had by a metamorphosis become the unknown and unthought. Just there, the visibility of men died. Against this, the operational Language begins again — allowing very little anthropomorphism. There where he does not think he is thinking. The astonishment of these reopened shapes in lives and poems. But then I (we) move back, for I (we) have been taught there is no operation in language. The poetic language is said to be apart — a wisdom — transcendent to it and not its composing intelligence. Is it in order to protect our eyes from some terrible finitude that has already happened? Or is it simply a mistake that takes on the proportions of the species? — as it is true to say that the buffalo still doesn’t know what a gun is. And I (we) have been taught always to translate the field of Language into a highwire — creative, transcendent, fictive to the terror the culture has been speaking. It is comforting to love nitrogen balloons. A discourse must return without transparency, but it cannot compose itself of closed words — the “spatial capture” of our words — in the stadium of the mirror (Lacan’s le stade du miroir, translated for the metaphor). . . .

The last syllable, silent and golden, always belongs to another poet. The duplicity of my (our) language blends a child’s thought with the risks of the “perilous act” thought is — and permits no luxurious ownership of language or of a consequent knowledge. All true language is thought and so reverses into experience. A breath-boundary, where it is a natural art. The dictation is natural. Things and words are not separate. Such language is not representational of a meaning backward or forward, occulted, lost or unfound, secret to a beginning of an end. It is not a manipulation of words, as in discourse, to refer transparently to a real significance. The operational language reposes the profound kinship of language with the world (Foucault). The dissolution of that binding and entangling has turned out to be ourselves and our discourse. The poetic left to an ideality or transcendence is not a poetic at all — but merely a substitute for the limitation my (our) thought has become. The operational language is conjunctive and reties the heart. The retied heart is an Other Heart. Who is speaking? — (Nietzsche’s profound and original question, asked again by Foucault) — reopens the language into its natural speech, — a double voice of a projective real whose harmony and disharmony are my (our) job. The Other Language.

Herman Melville

[from Herman Melville's Moby Dick, 1851]

Physiognomically regarded, the Sperm Whale is an anomalous creature. He has no proper nose. And since the nose is the central and most conspicuous of the features; and since it perhaps most modifies and finally controls their combined expression; hence it would seem that its entire absence, as an external appendage, must very largely affect the countenance of the whale. For as in landscape gardening, a spire, cupola, monument, or tower of some sort, is deemed almost indispensable to the completion of the scene; so no face can be physiognomically in keeping without the elevated open-work belfry of the nose. Dash the nose from Phidias's marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder! Nevertheless, Leviathan is of so mighty a magnitude, all his proportions so stately, that the same deficiency which in the sculptured Jove were hideous, in him is no blemish at all. Nay, it is an added grandeur. A nose to the whale would have been impertinent. As on your physiognomical voyage you sail round his vast head in your jolly-boat, your noble conceptions of him are never insulted by the reflection that he has a nose to be pulled. A pestilent conceit, which so often will insist upon obtruding even when beholding the mightiest royal beadle on his throne.

Saint-John Perse, aka Alexis Leger

[St.-John Perse, Exile and Other Poems, tr. Denis Devlin, Pantheon, 1949]

Rains [excerpt]

          To Katherine and Francis Biddle

I

The Banyan of the rain takes hold of the City,
      A hasty polyp rises to its coral wedding in all this milk of living water,
      And Idea, naked like a net-fighter, combs her girl's mane in the people's gardens.

      Sing, poem, at the opening cry of the waters the imminence of the theme,
      Sing, poem, at the trampling of the waters the evasion of the theme,
      High license in the flanks of the prophetic Virgins,

      Hatching of golden ovules in the tawny night of the slime
      And my bed made, O fraud! on the edge of such a dream,
      Where the poem, obscene rose, livens and grows and curls.

      Terrible Lord of my laughter, behold the earth smoking with a venison taste,
      Widow clay under virgin water, earth washed clean of the steps of sleepless men,
      And, smelled close-to like wine, does it not truly bring on loss of memory?

      Lord, terrible Lord of my laughter! behold on earth the reverse side of the dream,
      Like the reply of the high dunes to the rising tiered seas, behold, behold
      Earth used-up, the new hour in its swaddling clothes, and my heart host to a strange vowel.

2

Most suspect Nurses, Waiting-women with veiled elder eyes, O Rains through whom
      The unusual man keeps his caste, what shall we say tonight to him that sounds the depths of our vigil?
      On what new bed, from what restive head shall we ravish the valid spark?

      Silent the Ande over my roof, I am loud with applause, and it is for you, O Rains!
      I shall plead my cause before you: at your lance-points, my share of the world!
      Foam on the lips of the poem like milk of coral rocks!

      And she dancing like a snake-charmer at the entry of my phrases,
      Idea, naked as a sword-blade at the faction fight,
      Will teach me ceremony and measure against the poem's impatience.

      Terrible Lord of my laughter, save me from the avowal, the welcome and the song.
      Terrible Lord of my laughter, what offense rides on the lips of the rainstorm?
      How much fraud consumed beneath our loftiest migrations!

      In the clear night of noon, we proffer more than one new
      Proposition on the essence of being . . . O smoke-curves there on the hearth-stone!
      And the warm rain on our roofs did just as well to quench the lamps in our hands.

3

Sisters of the warriors of Assur were the tall Rains striding over the earth:
      Feather-helmeted, high-girded, spurred with silver and crystal,
      Like Dido treading on ivory at the gates of Carthage,

      Like Cortez' wife, heady with clay and painted, among her tall apocryphal plants . . .
      They revived with night-dark the blue on the butts of our weapons,
      They will people April in the mirrors' depths of our rooms!

      Nor would I forget their stamping on the thresholds of the chambers of ablution:
      Warrior-women, O warrior-women towards us sharpened by lance and dart-point!
      Dancing-women, O dancing-women on the ground multiplied by the dance and the earth's attraction!

      It is weapons by armfuls, helmeted girls by cartloads, a presentation of eagles to the legions,
      a rising with pikes in the slums for the youngest peoples of the earth -- broken sheaves of dissolute virgins,
      O great unbound sheaves! the ample and living harvest poured back into the arms of men!

      . . . And the City is of glass on its ebony base, knowledge in the mouths of fountains,
      And the foreigner reads the great harvest announcements on our walls,
      And freshness is in our walls where the Indian girl will stay tonight with the inmate.

Kenneth Koch

[from Kenneth Koch's Sun Out, Knopf, 2004]

Highway Barns, the Children of the Road

Amaryllis, is this paved highway a
Coincidence? There we were
On top of the fuel bin. In the autos
Dusk moved silently, like pine-needle mice.
Often I throw hay upon you,
She said. The painted horse had good news.
Yes, I really miss him, she waves,
She pants. In the dusk bin the fuel reasoned silently.
Amaryllis, is this paved highway a
Coincidence? My ears were glad. Aren't you?
Aren't you healthy in sight of the strawberries,
Which like pine-needle lace fight for dawn fuel?
The white mile was lighted up. We shortened
Our day by two whole tusks. The wind rang.
Where is the elephant graveyard? She missed the pavement.
A load of hay went within speaking distance of the raspberries.
Overture to the tone-deaf evening! I don't see its home.
Prawns fell from that sparkling blue sphere.
The land is coughing, "Joy!" Hey, pavements, you charmers,
When are you going to bring me good news?

Derek Walcott

[from Derek Walcott's White Egrets, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010]

2.

Your two cats squat, heraldic sphinxes, with such
desert indifference, such "who-the-hell-are-you?" calm,
they rise and stride away leisurely from your touch,
waiting for you only. To be cradled in one arm,
belly turned upward to be stroked by a brush
tugging burrs from their fur, eyes slitted
in ecstasy. The January sun spreads its balm
on earth's upturned belly, shadows that have always fitted
their shapes, re-fit them. Breakers spread welcome.
Accept it. Watch how spray will burst
like a cat scrambling up the side of a wall,
gripping, sliding, surrendering; how, at first,
its claws hook then slip with a quickening fall
to the lace-rocked foam. That is the heart, coming home,
trying to fasten on everything it moved from,
how salted things only increase its thirst.


II

Bossman, if you look in those bush there, you'll find
a whole set of passport, wallet, I.D., credit card,
that is no use to them, is money on their mind
and is not every time you'll find them afterwards.
You jest leave your bag wif these things on the sand,
and faster than wind they jump out of the bush
while you there swimming and rubbing tanning lotion,
and when you find out it is no good to send
the Special Unit, they done reach Massade.
But I not in that, not me, I does make a lickle
change selling and blowing conch shells, is sad
but is true. Dem faster than any vehicle,
and I self never get in any commotion
except with the waves, and soon all that will be lost.
Is too much tourist and too lickle employment.
How about a lickle life there? Thanks, but Boss,
don't let what I say spoil your enjoyment.

Mary Szybist

[from Mary Szybist's Granted, Alice James, 2003]

In the Glare of the Garden

Yes, the open mouth
of your watering can, it
reminds me of you, of
rushing toward
smallness, toward
a bright and yellowish
color. Its mouth is smaller
than any part of it,
smaller than any of those red
or yellow petals. It
reminds me of me, of
smallness that seems
closable, but isn't. Go ahead
and tilt it, keep it
up over the zinnias -- it
isn't empty. The zinnias
have their tongues out now almost
completely, let's have it
go to them. I don't think it has
ever seen them before,
let's have it
hold in the air a little
longer -- it doesn't know
the smell yet, yes,
I think you want emptiness
also, let's have it. And the zinnias
open and spark and unregarding it goes
out to them.

Charles Bernstein

[from Charles Bernstein's All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010]

Palukaville
[1975]

Listen. I can feel it. Specifically and intentionally. It does hurt. Gravity weighing it down. It's not too soft. I like it. Ringing like this. The hum. Words peeling. The one thing. Not so much limited as conditioned. Here. In this. Spurting. It tastes good. Clogs. Thick with shape. I carry it with me wherever I go. I like it like this. Smears. You can touch it. I know how to get there. Hold it. Tickles. I'm the one beside you. Needs no other. Textures of the signs of life. There is a way in. Only insofar as you let it divert you. "Short cuts, the means before the ends, the 'special ways'," all manners of veering we are schooled in. The straightest path. I don't mind waiting. In the way the world is true. I'm ready to come. Taking away what we've got doesn't compensate for what we've lost. Then, spit it out. It is heavy. Because love of language — the hum — the huhuman — excludes its reduction to a scientifically managed system of reference in which all is expediency and truth is nowhere. Schooled and reschooled. The core is neither soft nor hard. It's not the supposed referent that has that truth. Words themselves. The particulars of the language and not, note, the "depth structures" that "underlie" "all languages" require the attention of that which is neither incidentally nor accidentally related to the world. It's sweet enough. Not mere grids of possible worlds, as if truth were some kind of kicking boy, a form of rhetoric. Truthfulness, love of language: attending its telling. It's not unfair to read intentionality into other people's actions. The mocking of language (making as if it were a mock-up) evades rather than liberates. The world is in them. I can feel the weight of the fog. Hung. The hum is it. Touch it as it hangs on you. It feels good. I say so. I am not embarrassed to be embarrassed. My elementary school teachers thought I was vague, unsocial, & lacked the ability to coordinate the small muscles in my hands. The way it feels. The mistake is to think you can put on the mask at work and then take it off when you get home. I enjoy it. If I acted like a manager to please my managers it would be irrelevant what I thought "privately." The one-two punch: behaviorism and meritocracy. I couldn't spell at school and still can't. "Legibility," "diction," "orthography," "expository clarity." We have all been emptied of emotion. Shells, i.e., going through the motions of touching, holding, coming without care, love, etc. I'm trapped by the job only insofar as I transpose my language to fit it. An erotic pleasure pressing against the pen with my thumb, sore under the nail from a splinter. Then, come closer. Class struggle is certainly not furthered by poetry itself. Shards. Not how we're special that's important but how we're not. I would rather explore the quarry that is my life. Punched out of us. What I didn't learn in school was how to gaze on the mistakes I made out of sheer mediocrity. Intently. They are necessary. I don't mind feeling cramped. It is necessary constantly to remind ourselves of our weaknesses, deficiencies, and failings. Comes back. Not meet you or make you — certainly not figure you out — but to stand next to, be there with. Peaches and apples and pears; biscuits and French sauces. Acknowledgement. We can get up. A blur is no reason for distress. Already made it. The mists before each of us at any time can put to rest any lingering fantasies of clear view. I can still hear it. I'm sure. My present happiness is not what's important. My body. Well, I'm no different. The mistake is to look for the hidden. All here. A world of answers, sentence by sentence. By an act of will. I am as responsible for that "mask" as anything. If I look hard I can see it. The fact of an affluent white man seeking power is enough to make me distrust him. Give it up. It does matter. It is important. You refused because you realized order without justice is tyranny. There are alternatives. We live here. It's time. This is my secret. I knew from the first school wasn't for me. I would accept it if you said it. I no longer need to worry about sincerity. I am the masked man. Its purple. Orange. Queen Victoria Vermilion. A world of uncertainty and wonder. Sky grey. Of satisfaction. Let me stay in. This clearing. Security one more unnecessary underlining. I may stumble but I won't collapse. It's a nice day, the sun shines, the air has cleared. It's so blue. I like the fog. My reasons satisfy me. I have a place to sit. I've located it. It's enough. Worth. Holds. I want particulars. I have put out confusion. Tell me and I can tell you. I woke up. I met this girl. The morning came. I got it. It makes the tune my ear fashions. Slowly. Let me pronounce it for you.

Listen to Charles Bernstein read this.

Maurice Manning

[from Maurice Manning's The Common Man, Houghton Mifflin, 2010]

That Durned Ole Via Negativa

You ever say a word like naw,
that n, a, double-u instead

of no? Let's try it, naw. You feel
your jaw drop farther down and hang;

you say it slower, don't you, as if
a naw weighs twice as much as no.

It's also sadder sounding than
a no. Yore Daddy still alive?

a friend you haven't seen might ask.
If you say naw, it means you still

cannot get over him. But would
you want to? Naw. Did you hear it then,

that affirmation? You can't say naw
without the trickle of a smile.

The eggheads call that wistful, now --
O sad desire, O boiling pot

of melancholy pitch! Down in
that gloomy sadness always is

a hope. You gettin' any strange?
That always gets a naw, and a laugh.

I've had that asked of me. It's sad
to contemplate sometimes, but kind

of funny, too. It makes me think
of git and who came up with that,

and the last burdened letter hitched
to naw, that team of yous and yoked

together -- the you you are for now
and the you you might become if you

said yeah, to feel the sag of doubt
when only one of you is left

to pull the load of living. My,
but we're in lonesome country now.

I wonder if we ever leave it?
We could say yeah, but wouldn't we

be wiser if we stuck it out
with naw, and know the weight of what

we know is dragging right behind us,
the squeak and buck of gear along

with us, O mournful plea, O song
we know, by heart, by God, by heart.

Joshua Clover

[from Joshua Clover's The Totality for Kids, University of California, 2006]

In Jaufré Rudel's Song

The sun is abandoned into the thoughts one had about it.

The flowers lie fat on the field under the gong-filled air.

The field ends at the angry factor which keeps the numbers of the
    clock from flying off in twelve directions, beyond which his
    country.

She sends her voice into the pines, it returns at evening alone.

The crows hate her for her beauty, she is ugly as a poet.

There is a limited number of nights, though no particular night can
    prove this.

This is the greeting that the lovers exchange when they meet.

Worthy Evans

[from Worthy Evans's Green Revolver, University of South Carolina, 2010]

Sunset

The man and his wife walked up to the
canyon lip and he said It's good,
not great. But the book said to do it
so here we are. The man said he and
the wife got married and later looked
to the west as it stood before Lake
Pontchartrain. That was better,
and so was this place in Australia.

The wife until this point had been silent.
She was always the framer and picture
hanger for the husband, she told me as
we were walking back to the gift shop
to look at posters, postcards and
screen savers of what we had just seen.
I believe I'll take this one, she said.


Baked into the Cake

The bride was kissed. The cake
was eaten. Lula had completed
her customary belly dance and
there arose such an emotional
reception that tears came to my
eyes in delight. As these things do,
the good feeling died down and I
caught on to the one-way conversation
about doorknobs. Phillip the
bartender, he listened in too, after
serving me up a gin and tonic.
Marshall Weinstein, of the Kensington
Weinsteins, had clinked a glass and
begun the downhill slide into doorknobs.
Sometimes we encounter crystal
doorknobs that you need only push
to open the door, which had long since
swelled beyond the jamb. I began
to feel ill. Brass ones gleam brightly,
but oh, the polishing that we must
do. Marshall was up front, beside
Regina Whittingham, nee Winkleman,
and I was near the door at this
reception in the basement of a redone
barn. There were no doorknobs here.
The iron doorknobs with patterns
stamped upon them turn black over
time, get lost in sock drawers, where
little children mistake them for turtles.
He laughed at this, maybe remembering
some unprompted discovery after his dad
had gone to work. I remember missing
Lula's belly dancing, so in a twist in my chair,
I looked out the unlatched door at a mother
hen waddling around with her chicks.
My son isn't going to like her.

Alan Dugan

[from Alan Dugan's Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, Seven Stories, 2001]

Perverse Explanation for Mutilated Statuary

Her hair was made of poisonous snakes
and her mouth was an open scream,
so when they put their pricks in it
they had the feeling of having come
into nothing at all but a scream,
and the feeling of having been stung
all over. Then, as her teeth closed,
and they opened their eyes to stare,
they turned dead white and froze.

How else did they get there,
set up around Medusa's crypt,
those white statues of sound
young men with the missing pricks,
or with fig leaves over the wound?

Edward Dorn

[from Edward Dorn via Tom Clark in Jacket 16, “Poetry as a Difficult Labor,” November 1998]

The habit of considering personal expression or ‘lyric” as something that strives for compassion with all of the artifices which make up a poem, is in many ways a loathsome instrumentation that leads you into dishonesties and lies and pretenses that are damaging. It is damaging to the ability to absorb reality. In order to write a poem of any interest whatsoever, it should be beyond how one feels, which is largely a condition so freighted with lack of interest on anybody [else’s] part. You really have to educate yourself and the poem at the same time. That’s where it’s work, it’s labor.

Edward Dorn

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

Hemlocks

Red house.   Green tree in mist.
How many fir long hours.
How that split wood
warmed us.   How continuous.
Red house.   Green tree I miss.
The first snow came in October.
Always.   For three years.
And sat on our shoulders.
That clean grey sky.
That fine curtain of rain
like nice lace held our faces
up, in it, a kerchief for the nose
of softest rain.   Red house.

Those green mists rolling
down the hill.   Held our heads
when we went walking on the hills
to the side, with pleasure.
But sad.   That's sad.   That tall grass.
Toggenburg goat stood in, looking, chewing.
Time was its cud.   Oh
Red barn mist of our green trees of Him
who locks our nature in His deep nature
how continuous do we die to come down
as rain; that land's refrain
no we never go there anymore.

John Wheelwright

[from John Wheelwright's Collected Poems, New Directions, 1983]

Train Ride

          for Horace Gregory

After rain, through afterglow, the unfolding fan

of railway landscape sidled on the pivot

of a larger arc into the green of evening;

I remembered that noon I saw a gradual bud

still white; though dead in its warm bloom;

always the enemy is the foe at home.

       And I wondered what surgery could recover

our lost, long stride of indolence and leisure

which is labor in reverse; what physic recall the smile

not of lips, but of eyes as of the sea bemused.

       We, when we disperse from common sleep to several

tasks, we gather to despair; we, who assembled

once for hopes from common toil to dreams

or sickish and hurting or triumphal rapture;

always our enemy is our foe at home.

       We, deafened with far scattered city rattles

to the hubbub of forest birds (never having

“had time” to grieve or to hear through vivid sleep

the sea knock on its cracked and hollow stones)

so that the stars, almost, and birds comply,

and the garden-wet; the trees retire; We are

a scared patrol, fearing the guns behind;

always the enemy is the foe at home.

       What wonder that we fear our own eyes’ look

and fidget to be at home alone, and pitifully

put off age by some change in brushing the hair

and stumble to our ends like smothered runners at their tape;

       We follow our shreds of fame into an ambush.

       Then (as while the stars herd to the great trough

the blind, in the always-only-outward of their dismantled

archways, awake at the smell of warmed stone

or to the sound of reeds, lifting from the dim

into their segment of green dawn) always

our enemy is our foe at home, more

certainly than through spoken words or from grief-

twisted writing on paper, unblotted by tears

the thought came:

                            There is no physic

for the world’s ill, nor surgery; it must

(hot smell of tar on wet salt air)

burn in a fever forever, an incense pierced

with arrows, whose name is Love and another name

Rebellion (the twinge, the gulf, split seconds,

the very raindrop, render, and instancy

of Love).

       All Poetry to this not-to-be-looked upon sun

of Passion is the moon’s cupped light; all

Politics to this moon, a moon’s reflected

cupped light, like the moon of Rome, after

the deep wells of Grecian light sank low;

always the enemy is the foe at home.

       But these three are friends whose arms twine

without words; as, in a still air,

the great grove leans to wind, past and to come.

Noelle Kocot

[2 sestinas from Noelle Kocot's The Raving Fortune, Four Way Books, 2004]

Why We Go to Couple's Counseling

In spite of all common sense, I make my home in the rotisserie
Of your teeth. This was all prewritten on the gravity
Of a giant planet, and those slightly corrupted
Particles of light that formed the stars.
You say the Eternal. The eternal is not mine but has a Big Mission.
Despite our differences, we manage to create a hoax

Of nice weather, an unresolved moment. But the hoax
Is that I search for warmth within the cave of you, a dry rotisserie
Chicken with a mission.
I eat myself and plunge my bones into the gravity
Of crop circles filling with stars.
Our love has been corrupted.

But not corrupted
As one might deem a warped roll of flim, a hoax
Of UFO pictures submerged in an ocean of fireflied stars,
But love that hangs on a rotisserie
In a Chinese restaurant, where the waiter brings our check with a
     gravity
Whose mission

Is known only to us, who won't be missionary
Later that same night amid readings of Trakl's autumn and black
      corruption.
Gravity.
What a weighty word! And what if Newton's apple were a hoax,
Nothing more than the stuff in a pig's mouth on a rotisserie
Casting itself up into the stars

To forge a new constellation? I admit, I'm starry-
Eyed when I look at you, every moment seems a mission
Where I am the pig on the rotisserie,
Every oink I oink to you corrupted.
Surely I'm a hoax
And a half laid out in resourceful capsules, but I am in grave

Error if I believe the gravity
Of our rhetoric reaches beyond a drawing of a house with cut-out stars
Above it, some stick figures of cats and children. A hoax
It may be but my mission
Is not complete until I corrupt
All that's been said and search for warmth within my own private
      rotisserie,

And remember that in the last horizontal hoax of my mission's
Superfluous event, the gravity of my lion paws stretch across the ruins
      of the stars
And lie corrupted in your teeth's rotisserie.


Rushing through the House I Behold the Numinous Dark
of Forks, the Light-Bearing Phenomenology of Sunrise

They say the wind was born, bearing its beautiful teeth of light.
They say it is impossible to mingle with a Snuffelufagus
Because nobody else can see it. Nobody could see the prophet
In the man I met, the wandering Christ in long Franciscan robes.
I invited him in and he advised me on semiotics
And the nuances of pop music.

The fact that he stunk to high heaven did not detract from the music
Of his speech, or should I say speech acts? It was all in the way the
      light
Hit the room, bounced off his hair in a just-so way, to invite the
      semiotics
Of this newest mania into my brain, he was a Snuffelufagus
Having fun with my hell-mind, enrobed
With the fateful words of prophets

Gone awry. In his vision I, too, would be a prophet
Someday, drinking in the reckless breath of music
Like a tray of tiny baritones in oversized robes
Singing "We're in treble now." See, it was all wrong, the light
Was not light at all, it was another bloody sunset where
      Snuffelufagus
Got sent to the abbatoir in an acrostic made of arrows, drooling the
      semiotics

Of a Rimbaud poem while I did not sleep off the semiotics
Of my newest fancies. Now I have all but forgotten the man, his
      prophesies
Might as well be oatmeal, O pretty Snuffelufagus,
Take this and eat it, this is my body . . . You see, I'm on the
      sentimental fringe of musical
Daydreams, I have dumbed down my brief renaissance into particles of
      light,
Into doo-wop promises that trickle in among the stars. My robes

Fly open at the slightest suggestion that I've got my lute in hand,
      and while I know disrobing
Is the right thing to do, I feel unsure of the semiotics
Of the horse-flavored cheesecake I ordered once in a restaurant, how
      to step lightly
Or to have fun with my new mind, flapping up and down its
      non-prophesies
Like a toupee in well-water. Somebody help. I know that music
Won't, the Snuffelufagus

Might, but even the Snuffelufagus
Is making horrible crying noises to go home, wherever home is. My
      robe
Sweeps the floor of grains of bitterness, a wrecking ball sans music.
I know that if I start to take the semiotics
Of my newly-sibilant esses too seriously, I will get varicose zones
      of speech, I will fall asleep in prophesies
Swinging from vainglorious vines, and my mind will not resound into
      lute-filled light.

Music is magnificent, splendiferous, whereas the discussion of the
      semiotics
Of my illness is boring. Snuffelufagus, you wear my robes obliquely
As an invitation to the prophets, bearing their beautiful teeth of
      light.

Tan Lin

Bomb interview with Tan Lin about his new book Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004 The Joy of Cooking.

Cecily Parks

[from Cecily Parks's Cold Work, Poetry Society of America, 2005]

Harem

Eunuchs gather as groves
in a sultanate of snow,
shadowing each cow
as she grazes, starves or calves

before calving-time.
Weathers, deaths, rivulets
away, discarded velvet,
gummed by blood’s birdlime,

will frill saplings and deadfall:
moss ottomans
and racket share one season.
Until then, one bull

descends. His tracks: cleft.
His path:
harem-culled, swath-
cut. His antlers’ heft:

one wet meadow,
sixty swelling bellies,
the bells of sego lilies.
Especially now, his rivals grow.

Jillian Brall

[from Jillian Brall's Wet Information, ZoeWo, 2009]

Symptomatic

This sacred stuff.
Doesn't it scare you stiff?
While you log and categorize
your resistances and right angles,
animals are hatching from a variety of shells,
satellites are being installed in house craniums,
and you are staring at something sweet
that someone has thrown in a sewer.

This stone stuff.
Doesn't it sculpt you as you sculpt it?
While you log and categorize
your skills and deficiencies,
the sad saga sags on,
the stories of other people,
the splendor of success.
It makes you stupid.

This sharp stuff.
Doesn't it shape you like Moses' staff?
While you log and categorize
your potential and probable downfalls,
slogans are shoving their way through your showerhead,
there's more to the scum you scrape than you thought,
and the stickiness is something scientists and patent offices dream of.

This soapy stuff.
What does it conceal beneath its film?
While you log and categorize
your measurements and magnetism,
the sun seeps through the blinds
and you slither on the floor.
Sure, we all know
standing stinks.

Sylvia Plath

[from Sylvia Plath's Ariel: The Restored Edition, Harper Collins, 2004]

The Rabbit Catcher

It was a place of force —
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
Its black spikes,
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
And were extravagant, like torture.

There was only one place to get to.
Simmering, perfumed,
The paths narrowed into the hollow.
And the snares almost effaced themselves —
Zeroes, shutting on nothing,

Set close, like birth pangs.
The absence of shrieks
Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.
The glassy light was a clear wall,
The thickets quiet.

I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
Ringing the white china.
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship —
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick ting,
The constriction killing me also.

Ted Hughes

[from Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters, FSG, 1998]

The Afterbirth

Huddled on the floor, the afterbirth
Was already offal.
There was the lotus-eater's whole island
Dragged out by its roots, into the light,
And flopped onto blood-soaked newsprint — a tangled
Puddle of dawn reds and evening purples,
To be rubbished. You were laughing and weeping
Into the glare. A tear-splitting dazzle
Like the noon sun finally stared at
Had burst into the bedroom when the Gorgon
Arrived and ripped her face off
And threw it to the floor. Such a shocking
Beauty born. I saw it flash up
That sunburned German with all his strength
Slamming the sea-tripes of the octopus
Hard down onto our honeymoon quay —
In the blue-blackish glare
Of my sunstroke.
                             You were weeping
Your biggest, purest joy. The placenta
Already meaningless, asphyxiated.
Your eyes dazzling tears as I thought
No other brown eyes could, ever,
As you lifted the dazzler. I eased
The heavy, fallen Eden into a bowl
Of ovenproof glass. A bowl with a meaning
All to itself — a hare crouching
In its claret — the curled-up, chopped-up corpse
That weeks before I had jugged in it. I felt
Like somebody's shadow on a cave wall.
A figure with a dog's head
On a tomb wall in Egypt. You watched me
From your bed, through the window,
As I bured the bowlful of afterbirth
In a motherly hump of ancient Britain,
Under the elms. You would eat no more hare
Jugged in the wine of its own blood
Out of that bowl. The hare nesting in it
Had opened its eye. As if some night,
Maybe with a thick snow falling softly,
It might come hobbling down from under the elms
Into our yard, crying: "Mother! Mother!
They are going to eat me."
                                           Or bob up.
Dodging ahead, a witchy familiar, sent
To lock error beyond repair when it
Died silent, a black jolt,
Under my offside rear wheel
On the dawn A30. You heard nothing.
But it bled out of my pen. And re-formed
On my page, The hieroglyph of the hare.
You picked it up, curious.
And it screamed in your ear like a telephone —
The moon-eyed, ripped-up flower of it screamed.
Disembowelled, a stunned mask,
Unstoppably, like a burst artery,
The hare in the bowl screamed —

Cole Swenson

[from Cole Swenson, The Book of a Hundred Hands, University of Iowa, 2005]

Traveling

As it carves its world
from the aerodrome of nerve and dream, additional dimensions and
     projections
of the thing, enormous, internal
and verdant
becomes this
                         acreage paced, this mile after mile
that the hand each day travels as it waves,
or covers a yawn, or sweeps, or puts down
a baton. The orchestra conductor wears an odometer
instead of a watch.

Fred Chappell

[from Fred Chappell's Midquest, Louisiana State, 1981]

Firewood [excerpt]

. . . what God has joined together
let no man put asunder, where the wedge not
an inch in an hour of hitting goes in and the
arms quiver exhausted, sweat soaking the crotch
of the twist shorts, and nothing, this baby
simply don't give & don't even promise just
like the nice girls back in high school, remember?,
going to be married to this flint round of
wood forever, till finally fin;al;ly it bust loose
to show the dagger-shaped knot hid in the
heart of it, black and ochre and dark red, looks like
a trawler steaming up the stream of veins,
or a stubborn island in the colorful river, what
secret part of my life is it? so resisting and
so in tight upon itself, so bitter bitter hard
until at last torn open shows that all the secret
was merely the hardness itself, there's no true
shame worth hiding but some knot of hurt
hardly recalled, yet how can I say it
is not beautiful this filigree of primaries,
its form hermetic in the flow of time the
rings transcribe, I will set it down amid
the perfect things, alongside the livid day
lilies here and the terrapins I brought home
as a child . . .

Robert Adamson

[Robert Adamson's The Goldfinches of Baghdad, Flood, 2006]

Brahminy Kite

Humidity envelops my boat, black mould
embellishes its trim. There are mullet-gut stains
on the seats. Tides flood in across the mudflats
and small black crabs play their fiddle-claw
with a feeble left bow, day in, night out.
My hand swoops to catch a lure.
Talons pierce scales and a heart.

We grasp the core only gradually
of each other’s compressed midnights —
black roses flowering in sandy-eyed dawns,
memories stowed to starboard, where a
brahminy’s wings catch first light.
How did we manage it, sailing
on — weathering

leagues of years? We’re a far cry now from
beating wings and arched poetic myths:
the swell’s escalator takes us up over the top
of the world into white crests and gull-squawk.
Now there are fields of light to relinquish
and dolphin fish skittering around
markers, slicing apart an oily sea.

Off Barrenjoey, the kite hits thermals,
then lifts into a triple rainbow stained with
yellowtail blood and slime. Its beaked head fits over
my face, sea-spray stings my eyes. In the haze
beyond tiredness, its wings cut through
an atmosphere thick with salt
and the glint of fish scales.

John Ashbery

[from John Ashbery's Rivers and Mountains, Holt, 1966]

Blessing in Disguise

Yes, they are alive and can have those colors,
But I, in my soul, am alive too.
I feel I must sing and dance, to tell
Of this in a way, that knowing you may be drawn to me.

And I sing amid despair and isolation
Of the chance to know you, to sing of me
Which are you. You see,
You hold me up to the light in a way

I should never have expected, or suspected, perhaps
Because you always tell me I am you,
And right. The great spruces loom.
I am yours to die with, to desire.

I cannot ever think of me, I desire you
For a room in which the chairs ever
Have their backs turned to the light
Inflicted on the stone and paths, the real trees

That seem to shine at me through a lattice toward you.
If the wild light of this January day is true
I pledge me to be truthful unto you
Whom I cannot ever stop remembering.

Remembering to forgive. Remember to pass beyond you into the day
On the wings of the secret you will never know.
Taking me from myself, in the path
Which the pastel girth of the day has assigned to me.

I prefer “you” in the plural, I want “you”
You must come to me, all golden and pale
Like the dew and the air.
And then I start getting this feeling of exaltation.

Edward Dorn

[one of Edward Dorn's "Twenty-four Love Songs" from Way Out West, Penguin, 2007]

23

And then, if you come
to the mountains, what
is there more, ore in mines
ore in veins, or more fully than
you might have had it elsewhere.
Call them the Rockie mountains.
They aren't yours and
you never thought they were because
you lived in them too sometime,
someplace ago and know better.
There is a vast smell of marriage
not lightly said, some place
some time ago I was there too.
I've been everywhere.
This afternoon I thought why not,
why not get Jenny into something
and we both fly off to meet,
well, almost anyone. Away
from the flat rancorous smell
of their insinuation, which is
just this: you've done the thing —
you've presumed your body
as well as your mind, your mind
we like to watch go through its sideshow
lifted up in the bright creative air
but when you made other arrangements
for your body, baby go away, that's it


[excerpt from Dorn's Gunslinger]

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.