Evening Light
by Anthony Abbott
The trees undress slowly from the top.
Bare arms arc brownly into the sky. It is
sunset. Orange skirts swirl in an awful
dying light. The ground is littered gold.
I stop the scene with the shutter of my eye—
stop and hold and mark—this blue, these reds
and holding greens—those rusts upon the ground.
I stoop and pick and hold this one dry leaf.
It crumbles in my hand, and I see a picture
from the morning paper speak as if alive.
Five Turkish children killed by earthquake
lie upon the ground, seemingly asleep.
The mother screams above, mouth horror ravaged,
while in Kentucky and Ohio other mothers weep
into clean white handkerchiefs as taps are played
and flags are placed into their hollow laps.
Hats do not suffice. The time is never right.
Beauty is always almost gone. This dress, this
cock of the head, this touch, this curl of hair,
this graying beard, that look over the shoulder.
We are taken so suddenly, the breath goes
in white astonishment. If I had known is not
enough. Say it now. Say it now. Say it now.
Before the shutter clicks once more and closes.
21 September 2005
11 September 2005
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Moonrise June 19
1876
I awoke in the midsummer not-to-call night, |
in the white and the walk of the morning:
The móon dwíndled and thínned to the frínge |
of a fíngernail héld to the cándle,
Or páring of páradisáïcal frúit, |
lóvely in wáning but lústerless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, |
of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, |
entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, |
unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, |
eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
1876
I awoke in the midsummer not-to-call night, |
in the white and the walk of the morning:
The móon dwíndled and thínned to the frínge |
of a fíngernail héld to the cándle,
Or páring of páradisáïcal frúit, |
lóvely in wáning but lústerless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, |
of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, |
entangled him, not quit utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, |
unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, |
eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
10 September 2005
Carol Bly
From Carol Bly’s Beyond the Writers’ Workshop:
Copyright 2001. Who in the world by the late date of 2001 found it “easy and gratifying . . . to think of men in ascot and waistcoat and striped morning pants”? I don’t even find it easy to think of women decking themselves out to attract men. That aside, Bly proceeds convincingly:
Our efforts to think and feel beyond simple love of family or love of nature are a fragile enterprise! We will have to keep reminding ourselves of how this civilization, the stuff nonfiction writers [CP: poets and novelists, too] write about, works out cruelly for some, cruelly for all at some times, cruelly all their lives for still others.
Literary colleagues may assure us that such thinking will make us shrill. “I used to love your work so much,” they will say, “back when you just described how people are and you didn’t press for change.” Such friends and colleagues far prefer rereading Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway to reading Three Guineas all through once. In Mrs. Dalloway the character Hugh Whitbread was still only an emerging shadow of a villain. He was still just one of Woolf’s aesthetic achievements—an interesting character vaguely benefiting, but only vaguely, from being a privileged player in “the system.” By the time she wrote Three Guineas, Woolf recognized the Hugh Whitbreads as the beneficiaries and manipulators of unethical entitlement because by then she had asked the question: “Who is the victim for whom this civilization doesn’t work out fairly? And now that I have shown you the victim, we had better ask who, exactly, is the predator?”
Of course, the Woolf of Three Guineas is less charming than the scrupulous but still merely sensuous novelist of Mrs. Dalloway. It is odd how easy and gratifying it is to think of men in ascot and waistcoat and striped morning pants, yet how awful it is to think of a major perpretrator of war and poeverty (not just to women—to everyone) in that same morning dress! We may wish that someone had not pointed it out to us that the villain often wears the correct school tie, but the pyschological fact is that once it has been pointed out to us we are pinned. We will look at Hugh Whitbread but see poor women’s buckets and dead soldiers’ heads and limbs on the beach.
Copyright 2001. Who in the world by the late date of 2001 found it “easy and gratifying . . . to think of men in ascot and waistcoat and striped morning pants”? I don’t even find it easy to think of women decking themselves out to attract men. That aside, Bly proceeds convincingly:
Once we . . . writers have asked either question, “Who is the victim for whom this civilization doesn’t work out fairly?” or “Who exactly is the predator?” we can never go back. We will never again equate a sojourn in the wilds with a spiritual journey. From then on, we will see the wilds wistfully, as someplace not yet intruded on and misused by our lot. Enjoying nature is from then on only escape.
09 September 2005
Robinson Jeffers
The Purse-Seine
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;
daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the
phorphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off
New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the
sea’s night-purple; he points, and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal
and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.
I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the
crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the
other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted
with flame, like a live rocket
A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the
narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,
sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.
Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could
I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful
the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our
children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers
—or revolutaion, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls—or anarchy,
the mass disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that
cultures decay, and life’s end is death.
- 1937
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark of the moon;
daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net, unable to see the
phorphorescence of the shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting Santa Cruz; off
New Year’s Point or off Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color light on the
sea’s night-purple; he points, and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the gleaming shoal
and drifts out her seine-net. They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great labor haul it in.
I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible, then, when the
crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall to the
other of their closing destiny the phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body sheeted
with flame, like a live rocket
A comet’s tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside the
narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up to watch,
sighing in the dark; the vast walls of night
Stand erect to the stars.
Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light: how could
I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how beautiful
the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into interdependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet they
shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children’s, but we and our
children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all powers
—or revolutaion, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls—or anarchy,
the mass disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that
cultures decay, and life’s end is death.
- 1937
04 September 2005
My thanks to Steve for the link to this Peter Ackroyd interview occasioned by his new biography of Shakespeare. Ackroyd is one of my favorite writers, and if you've not read his novel Hawksmoor, you've missed a great great work.
30 August 2005
James Longenbach
29 August 2005
Kevin Canty
Apparently some readers are tired of listening to Kevin Canty write about alcoholics and other failures, but not me. I have read and will continue to read anything from Canty because he’s an adult who writes of the impossibility of being an adult, of the need to let go, give up, fuck up, sometimes fatally. His characters drink and/or take drugs to help them through lunch, through the horror of five o’clock and all those ghastly hours until nightly oblivion. His characters also fall in love frequently, fast, and hard.
The new novel, Winslow in Love, is that same old thing, a grownup who can’t clean up his act. I felt so at home. I couldn’t put the book down. Canty captures the giving way so well, the speeding through the rotary in the rain on the borrowed motorcycle and realizing you can’t hold the line because you’re afraid to hold the line and that’s why you drop the bike, bang it and yourself up. No, Canty’s Winslow didn’t do that, I did. Before today, I don’t think I’ve ever admitted to anyone except myself that the failure was will, not skill, and my relief at crashing felt immense and pleasurable. I was playing too hard, exhausting myself with possibilities. I needed a hard stop, like a wet curb, and the consequences didn’t matter, or I chose to believe that. What’s amazing is that Canty draws such scenes as ironic arabesques right up to the real-life stop, the place where irony collapses into trauma and electric shock treatments, unemployment and divorce, straight chair and cheap whiskey in the unfurnished apartment.
Canty surprised me with this novel. At the end, I talked back to him, chastised him for tomfoolery, but my objections didn’t survive thinking them through. He knows what he’s doing, knows the amplitude of irony and hope, the humor of a Hallmark card. If you’re a functional adult, skip this book.
The new novel, Winslow in Love, is that same old thing, a grownup who can’t clean up his act. I felt so at home. I couldn’t put the book down. Canty captures the giving way so well, the speeding through the rotary in the rain on the borrowed motorcycle and realizing you can’t hold the line because you’re afraid to hold the line and that’s why you drop the bike, bang it and yourself up. No, Canty’s Winslow didn’t do that, I did. Before today, I don’t think I’ve ever admitted to anyone except myself that the failure was will, not skill, and my relief at crashing felt immense and pleasurable. I was playing too hard, exhausting myself with possibilities. I needed a hard stop, like a wet curb, and the consequences didn’t matter, or I chose to believe that. What’s amazing is that Canty draws such scenes as ironic arabesques right up to the real-life stop, the place where irony collapses into trauma and electric shock treatments, unemployment and divorce, straight chair and cheap whiskey in the unfurnished apartment.
Canty surprised me with this novel. At the end, I talked back to him, chastised him for tomfoolery, but my objections didn’t survive thinking them through. He knows what he’s doing, knows the amplitude of irony and hope, the humor of a Hallmark card. If you’re a functional adult, skip this book.
28 August 2005
more Lyn Hejinian
[From The Cell by Lyn Hejinian]
It is obstructive to be
round against the lightness of
the wall
A social encounter not seeming
to happen as it will
Nations blossom and reward from
the vines of latitude and
the individual person swallows the
pace
Where else would I find
the space to read
Deliberately to keep the sensory
and the world apart
The open sky is blue
with storage, is waves receding
violently through the trees
And for whom never to
tell
Two people cannot be bare
at the same time because
they have to exchange visibility
You can listen to Lyn read some of her work by going to the ever marvy Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo.
It is obstructive to be
round against the lightness of
the wall
A social encounter not seeming
to happen as it will
Nations blossom and reward from
the vines of latitude and
the individual person swallows the
pace
Where else would I find
the space to read
Deliberately to keep the sensory
and the world apart
The open sky is blue
with storage, is waves receding
violently through the trees
And for whom never to
tell
Two people cannot be bare
at the same time because
they have to exchange visibility
You can listen to Lyn read some of her work by going to the ever marvy Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo.
this Sunday morning
my bones hang to
gether like pinched dragonflies
shake loose my skin
-- Sonia Sanchez
gether like pinched dragonflies
shake loose my skin
-- Sonia Sanchez
24 August 2005
James Galvin
[from The Meadow by James Galvin]
When his arm was fully extended he moved his hand underneath the rock, still slow in the current, until he touched a fin slowly wavering like a gently fanning angel’s wing. In his mind he could see the beautifully speckled body as he moved his hand forward to the slick cold under the gills. He began to wave his hand gently from the wrist like a willow branch trailing the current. He stroked back along the sleek form toward the vent to see how big a fish he was rocking to sleep. It was fourteen inches or so, big for a native brookie, enough for a good breakfast.
He massaged softly, working his hand forward, and when his hand was behind the gills again he knew the fish was dead asleep. In one swift motion he grasped it and lifted it out of the water in a shower of gemlike drops that fell back into the creek, which was itself as full of light as it was of water. With a deft motion of his left hand he shoved the head up and back until he heard a definitive snap. He leapt back to the bank, his hand already reaching into his pocket for his clasp knife.
One cut, slick as a zipper, from vent to gills, revealed the inner mysteries. The second cut popped out a flap under the chin. He inserted his thumb and pulled, removing the lower fins, gills, and viscera. He threw them all in one piece back into the stream. It made a gulping sound where it went under. He slid his thumbnail down the bloodline in the spine, dunked the fish, closed his knife one-handed against his hip, and emerged from the willows, breakfast in hand.
If you don't know Galvin, he's a poet. This particular book is an homage, might be called a memoir, and prose only in that it's not lineated.
When his arm was fully extended he moved his hand underneath the rock, still slow in the current, until he touched a fin slowly wavering like a gently fanning angel’s wing. In his mind he could see the beautifully speckled body as he moved his hand forward to the slick cold under the gills. He began to wave his hand gently from the wrist like a willow branch trailing the current. He stroked back along the sleek form toward the vent to see how big a fish he was rocking to sleep. It was fourteen inches or so, big for a native brookie, enough for a good breakfast.
He massaged softly, working his hand forward, and when his hand was behind the gills again he knew the fish was dead asleep. In one swift motion he grasped it and lifted it out of the water in a shower of gemlike drops that fell back into the creek, which was itself as full of light as it was of water. With a deft motion of his left hand he shoved the head up and back until he heard a definitive snap. He leapt back to the bank, his hand already reaching into his pocket for his clasp knife.
One cut, slick as a zipper, from vent to gills, revealed the inner mysteries. The second cut popped out a flap under the chin. He inserted his thumb and pulled, removing the lower fins, gills, and viscera. He threw them all in one piece back into the stream. It made a gulping sound where it went under. He slid his thumbnail down the bloodline in the spine, dunked the fish, closed his knife one-handed against his hip, and emerged from the willows, breakfast in hand.
If you don't know Galvin, he's a poet. This particular book is an homage, might be called a memoir, and prose only in that it's not lineated.
I am so baffled by this
Some days I think no one is home in the world. Should we volunteer to pay for abortions for these girls? Could we teach them why NOT to wear Paris Hilton skirts? Is this the final outcome of women's lib?
CANTON, Ohio -- According to a report in the Canton Repository, of the 490 female students at an Ohio high school, 65 are pregnant.
Timken High School officials were not sure why the pregnancy rate soared, but in response to them, the school planned to launch an educational program to address pregnancy, prevention and parenting, according to the report.
[CP: That's certainly going to help]
The newspaper also reported that students will face mounting tensions created by unplanned child-rearing responsibilities, causing students to quit school and plan for a GED, making it difficult for the Canton City School District to shake its Academic Watch designation by the state of Ohio.
[CP: mounting tensions, and wow, let's worry about that Academic Watch designation]
The high numbers come at a time when teen pregnancy rates across the nation are dropping.
According to the Canton Health Department, statistics through July show that 104 of the 586 babies born to Canton residents in Aultman Hospital and Mercy Medical Center had mothers between 11 and 19.
[CP: ELEVEN??????]
The newspaper reports that the non-Canton rate was 7 percent. Canton was 15 percent.
CANTON, Ohio -- According to a report in the Canton Repository, of the 490 female students at an Ohio high school, 65 are pregnant.
Timken High School officials were not sure why the pregnancy rate soared, but in response to them, the school planned to launch an educational program to address pregnancy, prevention and parenting, according to the report.
[CP: That's certainly going to help]
The newspaper also reported that students will face mounting tensions created by unplanned child-rearing responsibilities, causing students to quit school and plan for a GED, making it difficult for the Canton City School District to shake its Academic Watch designation by the state of Ohio.
[CP: mounting tensions, and wow, let's worry about that Academic Watch designation]
The high numbers come at a time when teen pregnancy rates across the nation are dropping.
According to the Canton Health Department, statistics through July show that 104 of the 586 babies born to Canton residents in Aultman Hospital and Mercy Medical Center had mothers between 11 and 19.
[CP: ELEVEN??????]
The newspaper reports that the non-Canton rate was 7 percent. Canton was 15 percent.
Muriel Rukeyser
Here's a poet I find difficult to quote. For one thing, she wrote many long poems. She also wrote sequences of related poems, e.g., "The Book of the Dead" in U. S. 1 (1938). Here are two poems from The Speed of Darkness (1968):
A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida
My son as child saying
God
is anything, even a little stone in the middle of the road, in Florida.
Yesterday
Nancy, my friend, after long illness:
You know what can lift me up, take me right out of despair?
No, what?
Anything.
From Word of Mouth
Spain.
Sex of cactus and cypresses.
Tile-orange, green; olive; black. The sea.
One man. Beethoven radio. War.
Threat of all life. Within my belief's body.
Within my morning, music. High colored mountain
along the seacoast
where the swallows fly. . . .
Speeding back from the border.
A rock came spinning up
cast from the wheels of a car.
Crackled the windshield glass.
Glitter before my eyes like a man made of snow
lying over the hood, blind white except for glints
an inch of sight where Languedoc shines through.
You on my one side, you on the other!
What I have is dazzle. My son; my friend;
tell me this side and tell me that side,
news of the road near Agde.
Word from this side, word from the tree-side—
Spain at our back : agony : before me, glitter,
today
blinding my eyes, blind diamonds, one clear wound.
Something is flying out of the sky behind me.
Turning, stirring of dream, something is speeding,
something is overtaking.
Stirrings in prisons, on beds, the mouths of the young,
resist, dance, love. It drives through the back of my head,
through my eyes and breasts and mouth.
I know a harvest : mass in the wine country.
A lifetime after, and still alive.
Something out of Spain, into the general light!
I drive blind white, trusting news of this side,
news of that side, all the time the line of the poem:
Amor, pena, desig, somni, dolor.
The grapes have become wine by the hand of man.
Sea risen from the sea, a bearded king.
The seaward cemetery risen from the sea
like a woman rising.
Amor.
Phases of sun.
The wine declared god by the hand of man.
Pena.
A rumor given me by this side and that side.
We drive in brilliant glitter, in jungle night, in distant war,
in all our cities, in a word, overtaking.
Desig.
A cry received, gone past me into all men,
speaking, into all women.
A man goes into the sea,
bearded fire and all things rise from this blaze of eyes,
living, it speaks, driving forth from Spain,
somni, dolor,
These cliffs, these years. Do we drive into light?
Driven, live, overtaken?
Amor, pena, desig.
A Little Stone in the Middle of the Road, in Florida
My son as child saying
God
is anything, even a little stone in the middle of the road, in Florida.
Yesterday
Nancy, my friend, after long illness:
You know what can lift me up, take me right out of despair?
No, what?
Anything.
From Word of Mouth
Spain.
Sex of cactus and cypresses.
Tile-orange, green; olive; black. The sea.
One man. Beethoven radio. War.
Threat of all life. Within my belief's body.
Within my morning, music. High colored mountain
along the seacoast
where the swallows fly. . . .
Speeding back from the border.
A rock came spinning up
cast from the wheels of a car.
Crackled the windshield glass.
Glitter before my eyes like a man made of snow
lying over the hood, blind white except for glints
an inch of sight where Languedoc shines through.
You on my one side, you on the other!
What I have is dazzle. My son; my friend;
tell me this side and tell me that side,
news of the road near Agde.
Word from this side, word from the tree-side—
Spain at our back : agony : before me, glitter,
today
blinding my eyes, blind diamonds, one clear wound.
Something is flying out of the sky behind me.
Turning, stirring of dream, something is speeding,
something is overtaking.
Stirrings in prisons, on beds, the mouths of the young,
resist, dance, love. It drives through the back of my head,
through my eyes and breasts and mouth.
I know a harvest : mass in the wine country.
A lifetime after, and still alive.
Something out of Spain, into the general light!
I drive blind white, trusting news of this side,
news of that side, all the time the line of the poem:
Amor, pena, desig, somni, dolor.
The grapes have become wine by the hand of man.
Sea risen from the sea, a bearded king.
The seaward cemetery risen from the sea
like a woman rising.
Amor.
Phases of sun.
The wine declared god by the hand of man.
Pena.
A rumor given me by this side and that side.
We drive in brilliant glitter, in jungle night, in distant war,
in all our cities, in a word, overtaking.
Desig.
A cry received, gone past me into all men,
speaking, into all women.
A man goes into the sea,
bearded fire and all things rise from this blaze of eyes,
living, it speaks, driving forth from Spain,
somni, dolor,
These cliffs, these years. Do we drive into light?
Driven, live, overtaken?
Amor, pena, desig.
20 August 2005
Matthea Harvey
[from Sad Little Breathing Machine by Matthea Harvey]
Address to an Absent Flea
Reading the sonnet the old way
was impossible once the period
started leaping about. Through
the magnifying glass you seemed
a gadget God, with a suitably
parasitical air. I am trying not
to let making too much of things
become a habit—I read too slowly
already. Little Itch-Ticket whose
menu has only one item on it,
I think it’s important to be specific.
I’ve never felt desire before.
I won’t believe that was accidental
syntax. If a pen were a turret to me
I too might wait, nest in a tapestry
& save my stories for some bloodless day,
but please come back from wherever
you’ve gone. There is so little left.
Address to an Absent Flea
Reading the sonnet the old way
was impossible once the period
started leaping about. Through
the magnifying glass you seemed
a gadget God, with a suitably
parasitical air. I am trying not
to let making too much of things
become a habit—I read too slowly
already. Little Itch-Ticket whose
menu has only one item on it,
I think it’s important to be specific.
I’ve never felt desire before.
I won’t believe that was accidental
syntax. If a pen were a turret to me
I too might wait, nest in a tapestry
& save my stories for some bloodless day,
but please come back from wherever
you’ve gone. There is so little left.
19 August 2005
18 August 2005
13 August 2005
Margaret Atwood
No stories! No stories! Imagine a world without stories!
But that's exactly what you would have, if all the women were wise.
The Wise Virgins keep their lamps trimmed and filled with oil, and the bridegroom arrives, in the proper way, knocking at the front door, in time for his dinner;
no fuss, no muss, and also no story at all.
What can be told about the Wise Virgins, such bloodless paragons?
They bite their tongues, they watch their smart mouths, they sew their own clothing,
they achieve professional recognition, they do every right thing without effort.
Somehow they are insupportable; they have no narrative vices:
their wise smiles are too knowing, too knowing about us and our stupidities.
We suspect them of having mean hearts.
They are far too clever, not for their own good but for ours.
- from Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood
A delicious book of what? Essays? Short fictions? Take this book seriously, while laughing aloud. It's about writing, women, the bottom line. Better than chocolate.
And while you're at it, read everything else she's read, starting with The Blind Assassin. So good I read it and then listened to it on tape.
11 August 2005
Re: dreams
[From The Cell by Lyn Hejinian]
Dreams are perfect—it’s illogical
to think there could be
mistakes anywhere in them
Nothing intended
Not unless you could say
the psyche itself is a
mistake
But it’s natural that dreams
don’t change enough—so a
person repeats them to other
people
I pose a question and
immediately the psyche pops up
Not something one would naturally
name Patricia or Josh
Some nights I experience embarrassing
assimilations
Wide and near, bare and
far
There’s entertainment in dreams without
erudition in reality
Strongly competitive urges
Any immutable information is boring
A voice under the dream
and reality develops
An invisible reality
November 4, 1986
Dreams are perfect—it’s illogical
to think there could be
mistakes anywhere in them
Nothing intended
Not unless you could say
the psyche itself is a
mistake
But it’s natural that dreams
don’t change enough—so a
person repeats them to other
people
I pose a question and
immediately the psyche pops up
Not something one would naturally
name Patricia or Josh
Some nights I experience embarrassing
assimilations
Wide and near, bare and
far
There’s entertainment in dreams without
erudition in reality
Strongly competitive urges
Any immutable information is boring
A voice under the dream
and reality develops
An invisible reality
November 4, 1986
10 August 2005
Mehmedinovic on Kent Johnson's poetry
Below is an exchange between Ammiel Alcalay and Semezdin Mehmedinovic (Bosnian poet, author of Sarajevo Blues; 1998, City Lights; Nine Alexandrias, 2003, City Lights; and numerous other books in Bosnian) about Kent Johnson's Lyric Poetry After Auschwitz; the text was translated from Bosnian into English by Ammiel Alcalay.
Mon. 08 August
Ammiel,
I got the copy of Kent's book that you sent today? I read it immediately and was really struck by it: beautiful, humorous, very painful and intelligent. I haven't read anything this fresh in a long time: my hope would be that this poetry has some kind of serious effect or, barring that, that it at least bring back some primary faith in poetry. I'm happy that you're in some way present here; I had the feeling while I was reading the book that it was the direct result of your public work over the past ten years...
Sem
sem,
i'm going to ask you if I can quote you on this because there is a controversy raging on various poetry blogs now about kent's book and what you wrote here would be perfect...
Ammiel:
That would make me very happy - by all means quote me if you think that it is well enough articulated; I think that Kent's book needs to be talked about as much as possible precisely because it is unsettling; it's unsettling to the less talented and less courageous (and that, unfortunately, includes about 90% of the poets in America). I was reading somewhere, that one of the mindless assertions (but today
typical) written on one of the blogs is that the war in Iraq (the one Kent's book is dealing with) is 'old news.' Well, that's a terrifying phrase, not just because the war is ongoing and even more horrendous measures are in preparation but because, let's say, Hiroshima then is old news and poetry shouldn't try to deal with it, as if poetry were some prime time TV show. What must be most unnerving for poets here is the freshness of Kent's book on all levels - on the formal and every other level, because it's alive, it's speaking of reality, while most American poets would still rather go on writing about anything and everything except themselves in the world they're in, and certainly not about things that are so unsettling; what's more, they've been writing about nothing so long, that they're not in any position to write about anything concrete; the freshness of Kent's book completely overshadows most of what's being written now and it doesn't at all surprise me that there would be negative reactions among "the poets." But this actually really saddens me. Because the book opens a dialog with serious problems that all of us on this planet are living with, while a reaction like that makes it seem as if all that is at stake here is cleansing relations between poets and their conscience. But now I'm telling you things you know a lot more about and better than I do. So, that's it, I just want to say that I'm not at all indifferent to what is going on, that the whole thing hits very close to home for me.
s.
Mon. 08 August
Ammiel,
I got the copy of Kent's book that you sent today? I read it immediately and was really struck by it: beautiful, humorous, very painful and intelligent. I haven't read anything this fresh in a long time: my hope would be that this poetry has some kind of serious effect or, barring that, that it at least bring back some primary faith in poetry. I'm happy that you're in some way present here; I had the feeling while I was reading the book that it was the direct result of your public work over the past ten years...
Sem
sem,
i'm going to ask you if I can quote you on this because there is a controversy raging on various poetry blogs now about kent's book and what you wrote here would be perfect...
Ammiel:
That would make me very happy - by all means quote me if you think that it is well enough articulated; I think that Kent's book needs to be talked about as much as possible precisely because it is unsettling; it's unsettling to the less talented and less courageous (and that, unfortunately, includes about 90% of the poets in America). I was reading somewhere, that one of the mindless assertions (but today
typical) written on one of the blogs is that the war in Iraq (the one Kent's book is dealing with) is 'old news.' Well, that's a terrifying phrase, not just because the war is ongoing and even more horrendous measures are in preparation but because, let's say, Hiroshima then is old news and poetry shouldn't try to deal with it, as if poetry were some prime time TV show. What must be most unnerving for poets here is the freshness of Kent's book on all levels - on the formal and every other level, because it's alive, it's speaking of reality, while most American poets would still rather go on writing about anything and everything except themselves in the world they're in, and certainly not about things that are so unsettling; what's more, they've been writing about nothing so long, that they're not in any position to write about anything concrete; the freshness of Kent's book completely overshadows most of what's being written now and it doesn't at all surprise me that there would be negative reactions among "the poets." But this actually really saddens me. Because the book opens a dialog with serious problems that all of us on this planet are living with, while a reaction like that makes it seem as if all that is at stake here is cleansing relations between poets and their conscience. But now I'm telling you things you know a lot more about and better than I do. So, that's it, I just want to say that I'm not at all indifferent to what is going on, that the whole thing hits very close to home for me.
s.
08 August 2005
Cormac McCarthy
Although I've read most of Cormac McCarthy's work, Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West somehow slipped by me, so I'm reading it now as a warm up to McCarthy's latest novel, No Country for Old Men, which I'll read next.
McCarthy writes about men as he believes they are underneath the pretense of civilization. Every time I read him, I'm shocked anew at the bleakness of his vision, not that mine is any less bleak. Here's a scrap of the meeting between the kid and Toadvine:
McCarthy is also a prose stylist whose gifts are rarely matched:
[felloes: pieces of wood composing the rim of a wheel; duledge pegs: dowels joining the ends of the felloes that form the circle of a wheel]
McCarthy writes about men as he believes they are underneath the pretense of civilization. Every time I read him, I'm shocked anew at the bleakness of his vision, not that mine is any less bleak. Here's a scrap of the meeting between the kid and Toadvine:
When he woke it was daylight and the rain had stopped and he was looking up into the face of a man with long hair who was completely covered in mud. The man was saying something to him.
What? said the kid.
I said are you quits?
Quits?
Quits. Cause if you want some more of me you sure as hell goin to get it.
He looked at the sky. Very high, very small, a buzzard. He looked at the man. Is my neck broke? he said.
The man looked out over the lot and spat and looked at the boy again. Can you not get up?
I don’t know. I aint tried.
I never meant to break your neck.
No.
I meant to kill ye.
They aint nobody done it yet. He clawed at the mud and pushed himself up. The man was sitting on the planks with his boots alongside him. They aint nothin wrong with you, he said.
The kid looked about stiffly at the day. Where’s my boots? he said.
The man squinted at him. Flakes of dried mud fell from his face.
I’m goin to have to kill some son of a bitch if they got my boots.
Yonder looks like one of em.
The kid labored off through the mud and fetched up one boot. He slogged about in the yard feeling likely lumps of mud.
This your knife? he said.
The man squinted at him. Looks like it, he said.
The kid pitched it to him and he bent and picked it up and wiped the huge blade on his trouserleg. Thought somebody’d done stole you, he told the knife.
The kid found his other boot and came and sat on the boards. His hands were huge with mud and he wiped one of them briefly at his knee and let it fall again.
They sat there side by side looking out across the barren lot. There was a picket fence at the edge of the lot and beyond the fence a boy was drawing water at a well and there were chickens in the yard there. A man came from the dramshop door down the walk toward the outhouse. He stopped where they sat and looked at them and then stepped off into the mud. After a while he came back and stepped off into the mud again and went around and on up the walk.
The kid looked at the man. His head was strangely narrow and his hair was plastered up with mud in a bizarre and primitive coiffure. On his forehead were burned the letters H T and lower and almost between the eyes the letter F and these markings were splayed and garish as if the iron had been left too long. When he turned to look at the kid the kid could see that he had no ears. He stood up and sheathed the knife and started up the walk with the boots in his hand and the kid rose and followed.
Halfway to the hotel the man stopped and looked out at the mud and then sat down on the planks and pulled on the boots mud and all. Then he rose and slogged off through the lot to pick something up.
I want you to look here, he said. At my goddamned hat.
You couldn’t tell what it was, something dead. He flapped it about and pulled it over his head and went on and the kid followed.
McCarthy is also a prose stylist whose gifts are rarely matched:
Now wolves had come to follow them, great pale lobos with yellow eyes that trotted neat of foot or squatted in the shimmering heat to watch them where they made their noon halt. Moving on again. Loping, sidling, ambling with their long noses to the ground. In the evening their eyes shifted and winked out there on the edge of the firelight and in the morning when the riders rode out in the cool dark they could hear the snarling and the pop of their mouths behind them as they sacked the camp for meatscraps.
The wagons drew so dry they slouched from side to side like dogs and the sand was grinding them away. The wheels shrank and the spokes reeled in their hubs and clattered like loom-shafts and at night they’d drive false spokes into the mortices and tie them down with strips of green hide and they’d drive wedges between the iron of the tires and the suncracked felloes. They wobbled on, the trace of their untrue labors like sidewinder tracks in the sand. The duledge pegs worked loose and dropped behind. Wheels began to break up.
[felloes: pieces of wood composing the rim of a wheel; duledge pegs: dowels joining the ends of the felloes that form the circle of a wheel]
07 August 2005
Carol Peters
- to Robert Hass
I like blackberry
but not small shoulders
not small
no matter how true
listen how small objectifies
turns shoulders into a thing desired
all I want is desire
mine
I like blackberry
but not small shoulders
not small
no matter how true
listen how small objectifies
turns shoulders into a thing desired
all I want is desire
mine
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