César Vallejo

[from César Vallejo's Trilce, tr. Clayton Eshleman, Wesleyan, 1992]

XL

       Who would have told us that on a Sunday
like this, over arachnoid slopes
the shadow would rear completely frontal.
(A mollusc is attacking barren foundered eyes,
at the rate of two or more tantalean possibilities
against a half death rattle of remorseful blood).

       Then, not even the very back of the uninhabited
screen could wipe dry the arteries
extradosed with double neverthelesses.
As if they would have let us leave! As
if we weren't always meshed
at the two daily flanks of fatality!

       And how much we might have offended each other.
And yet how much we might have annoyed each other and
fought and made up again
and again.

       Who would have thought of such a Sunday,
when, dragging, six elbows are licking
this way, addled Mondayescent yolks.

       We might have pulled out against it, from under
the two wings of Love,
lustral third feathers, daggers,
new passages on oriental paper.
For today when we test if we even live,
almost a front at the most.

Barbara Deming

[from Mab Segrest's My Mama's Dead Squirrel: Lesbian Essays on Southern Culture, Firebrand, 1985]

. . . my father's death. Years ago now. It was on a weekend in the country and he'd been working outside with a pick and shovel, making a new garden plot. He'd had a heart attack and fallen there in the loose dirt. We'd called a rescue squad, and they were trying to bring him back to life, but -- couldn't. I was half-lying on the ground next to him, with my arms around his body. I realized that this was the first time in my life that I had felt able to really touch my father's body. I was holding hard to it -- with my love -- and with my grief. And my grief was partly that my father, whom I loved, was dying. But it was also that I knew already that his death would allow me to feel freer. I was mourning that this had to be so. It's a grief that is hard for me to speak of. That the only time I would feel free to touch him without feeling threatened by his power over me was when he lay dead -- it's unbearable to me. And I think there can hardly be a woman who hasn't felt a comparable grief. So it's an oversimplification to speak the truth that we sometimes wish men dead -- unless we also speak the truth which is perhaps even harder to face (as we try to find our own powers, to be our own women): the truth that this wish is unbearable to us. It rends us.

Walter Benjamin

[from Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller" from Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Harcourt Brace, 1968]

There is nothing that commends a story to memory more effectively than that chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis. And the more natural the process by which the storyteller forgoes psychological shading, the greater becomes the story’s claim to a place in the memory of the listener, the more completely is it integrated into his own experience, the greater will be his inclination to repeat it to someone else someday, sooner or later. This process of assimilation, which takes place in depth, requires a state of relaxation which is becoming rarer and rarer. If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom — are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. This is how today it is becoming unraveled at all its ends after being woven thousands of years ago in the ambience of the oldest forms of craftsmanship.

César Vallejo

[from César Vallejo's Trilce, tr. Clayton Eshleman, Wesleyan, 1992)

The grown-ups
— when are they coming back?
Blind Santiago is ringing six o'clock,
and it's already pretty dark.

Mother said she wouldn't be late.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel,
be careful going around there, where
stooped souls in torment
have just passed twanging their memories,
toward the silent barnyard, and where
the hens still getting settled,
had been so frightened.
We'd better stay here.
Mother said she wouldn't be late.

We shouldn't fret. Let's keep looking at
the boats — mine's the nicest of all!
we've been playing with all day long,
without fighting, how it should be:
they've stayed on the well water, ready,
loaded with candy for tomorrow.

So let's wait, obedient and with no
other choice, for the return, the apologies
of the grown-ups always in front
leaving us the little ones at home,
as if we couldn't
go away.

Aguedita, Nativa, Miguel?
I call out, I grope in the dark.
They can't have left me all alone,
the only prisoner can't be me.

Michel Houellebecq

[Michel Houellebecq, tr. Frank Wynne, The Elementary Particles, Knopf, 2000]

Generally, the initial reaction of a thwarted animal is to try harder to attain its goal. A starving chicken (Gallus domesticus) prevented from reaching its food by a wire fence will make increasingly frantic efforts to get through it. Gradually, however, this behavior is replaced by another which has no obvious purpose. When unable to find food, for example, pigeons (Columba livia) will frequently peck the ground even if nothing there is edible. Not only will they peck indiscriminately, but they start to preen their feathers; such inappropriate behavior, frequently observed in situations of frustration or conflict, is known as displacement activity. Early in 1986, just after he turned thirty, Bruno began to write.

Edgar Allen Poe

[from the preface of Poems by Edgar A. Poe, 1831]

A poem in my opinion is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception.

Patricia Goedicke

[from Patricia Goedicke's The Wind of Our Going, Copper Canyon Press, 1985]

Mahler in the Living Room

Low to the ground, the windows are full of lake water.
Leaden, the pure slabs rise straight up into the air

From the summerhouse, where we sit watching them,
Shivering on the threshold of late fall

As the bronze hills in their shabby coats
Arch themselves like hands over a cold radiator —

And Mahler in the living room like an earthquake. Behind the eyes
Sorrow heaves upward, the heavy planks of it gigantic

As armies at a distance, as oak trees, as the tar surface
Of a road giving way to frost, buckling under and over

To the white forces of winter; the underground tears bent
Like ribs cracking, hundreds of paralyzed veins

That are now, suddenly, released, in great silver floods
Powerful as oceans our whole lives rise up

Into a sky full of planets tumbling and shooting,
First lavender, then apricot, then plum-colored:

Hissing like skyrockets they streak
Over the slumberous oars in the depths voluptuously rowing

Velvet as elephants, whose liquid footsteps wallow
About to submerge everything: dock, landing place, lawn . . .

But there are jagged slashes too,
Impertinent brass flourishes, horns that bite air

And bray at each other like gold rifles

Over the little pebbles, the quaint Chinese sparrows
Of the piccolos humorously yammering, trying not to listen

To the huge hesitation waltz beneath them,
The passionate kettledrums rolling

In the throbbing cradle of the gut
Sighing over and over Let Go,

Abandon yourself to the pain, the wild love of it that surges,
Resistless, through everyone's secret bowels

Till the walls almost collapse, our clothes fall from us like leaves
Trembling, helplessly tossed

In an uncontrollable windstorm, the branches weave and sob
As if they would never stop, unbearable the sky,

Unbearable the weight of it, the loss, solitude, suffering,
The hills staring at us blindly,

The house nothing but a shell, the bare floors
Relentless, our eyes welling over with such pain

It is all absolutely uncontainable, in a few minutes
Surely everything will dissolve . . .


When the first duck of a new movement appears

In the middle distance, the bottlegreen oboe bobs
Blue-ringed, graceful, under the little rowboat;

The invisible red feet sturdily paddle
Like webbed spoons in the chill soup of the water

That turns into a flatness now,
The agonized surface lies down

In the glass eyes of the windows,
Those solid transparencies

We orchestrate ourselves
To keep the world framed, at bay

As the great lake of the symphony sways
Far down, far down

The violent sun sets,
Over the wet shingles, the shining flanks of the house

The threadbare arm of the hills sinks,
The wave of feeling rests.

Donald Revell

[from Donald Revell's The Bitter Withy, Alice James, 2009]

Desert Willow

The yellowbirds will not come to a younger man.
And then you add the sky, creating trees
Which add their voices to the birds’.
Almost instantly, the sky falls down in flames.
Wait a moment. Take a drink. Brush
The fly from your wrist. Flesh falls away.
The bone becomes slender, more attuned
To little changes in the wind, and then
The bone-branch flowers — soft trumpets
So quietly purple they are also white.
Welcome bees. Creation is something else.
I was living with good women from Italy
Right upstairs. The winter, after a long while,
Was a heavy bird, yellow where the sun would rise.

Julio Cortázar

[from Julio Cortázar’s Diary of Andrés Fava, tr. Anne Mclean, Archipelago, 2005]

Before understanding with sufficient dialectic clarity the irruption of poetry in any contemporary verbal genre, and by extension the eradication of “genres” as such, I felt its obscure work present in my prose, in what up till then had been prose. I wrote a novel where, without excessive effort, I managed to express well a clearly a repertoire of ideas and a set of sensations and sentiments. Later, amusing myself with a few short stories, I noticed the first signs of rot in that prose; fear of the “emphatic” period, the “fortissimo” end of chapter. Every proposition that contains a whole development of its object, is like a tiny chapter, and ergo should finish “roundly”; a discourse — and my prose was always discourse, like this that I write now effortlessly, because its content is rigorously transmissible — is composed of dozens of propositions, each one of which has its progression, its peripeteia, its know and its final crash, that artistic order that masters emotion and moves to applause, a gesture that consists of hitting the hands together to see if one can trap in them the je ne sais quoi that provokes enthusiasm.

When I realized I could no longer write like before, that language had turned its back on me, that the rhythms were demanding otherwise, and that on the whole what I was now writing (because I didn’t for a single minute decline the entreaty from within) was less valuable as meaning than as object, I had the first suspicion of the contemporary phenomenon. That was when I read Ulysses, with a South American delay. And I confirmed what was happening when I accidentally stumbled upon The Death of Virgil.

. . . liberty, won by the putrefaction of my excellent former prose, lies in getting as close as possible to the material to be expressed, the physical or fictitious material I want (or I'm obliged) to express. For this I escape from adequate language (which it isn't anyway, more like adequating) and I accept, provoke, invent and try out a way of saying things that — me keeping quite still in the middle — is a self-asserting of all that surrounds me, interests me, and awakens me. There you are, memory of a night on Congreso, an adolescent weeping on a bench. You are there, it's you. Well, now it's your turn because I want it to be, or because I accept that you want it: come, say yourself. This is a hand, this is a sheet of paper. Pass through me like light through a stained-glass window: make yourself word, be here. The order of the elements doesn't matter, it doesn't matter if you're really stained glass and the word illuminates you, making you be, or if you are the light itself and my word (yours, yes, but mine) will be little by little the stained glass that gives you meaning forever.

For others, which is the miracle.

Christine Hume

[from Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia, Green Rose, 2004]

No Less Remarkable Is the Metamorphosis of the Mastodon

Shimmer with mites

            minutes in the clear

Cliff-dripped blinking

Bully the fat-hung cold

By teaching it gongs

Your heads are full of it

            the grass you eat

A dream of being eaten

                        by wind

                        hues of the field

Causes such twisting

And stars orbiting a faint sun

            unproven as it is infinite

The headache you’ll grow into

Suggests all organisms are in the grips

                        of spiral urges

Under these circulations

You could not wear cirrus the way cows do

Always your mange meant to be smoke

            molting, moonglow

You own the smoke, its slow muzzle

Involuntary growl

            in sheep’s clothing

Do you know yet how

To metabolize that magnitude

Ear listening to blank spheres

Ever since incest has been dying out

All your organs redeem rock

Yea, one falls down

Then you fall and unyarn yes sir

            yes sir

&c then centre

is everywhere & then

circumference no where

Aimless and space-shot

You took some doing

Body-beard sweeps

Circles in the dirt

One winter hunger weirds your mind-wires

Curls your backwards

                        question

Infant air hardens like a cranium

Shut inside a cranium dark

Everything goes to prospect

C. D. Wright

[from C. D. Wright’s Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil, Copper Canyon, 2005]

Every year the poem I most want to write, the poem that would in effect allow me to stop writing, changes shapes, changes directions. It refuses to come forward, to stand still while I move to meet it, embrace and coax it to sit on the porch with me and watch the lightning bugs steal behind the fog’s heavy veil, listen for the drag of johnboats through the orchestra of locusts and frogs. An old handplow supports the mailbox, a split-rail fence borders the front lot. Hollyhocks and sunflowers loom there. At the end of the lot the road forks off to the left toward the river, to the right toward the old chicken slaughterhouse. The poem hangs back, wraithlike, yet impenetrable as briar. The porch is more impressive than the rest of the house. A moth as big as a girl’s hand spreads itself out on the screendoor. The house smells like beets. For in this poem it is always Arkansas, summer, evening. But in truth, the poem never sleeps unless I do, for if I were to come upon it sleeping, I would net it. And that would be that, my splendid catch.

Robin Blaser

[from Robin Blaser's The Holy Forest: Collected Poems of Robin Blaser, University of California, 2008]

An Appearance

Okay    A nightingale

does sing

             outside this window

A mirror of leaves and noise

                           This monument

has torn to pieces our guide book

of facts

                           This startles

A nightingale,

                    the bird so ancient

he ( anybody )

                      falls back

on his dusty shoes, pointing

The event darkens     So like

our trembling,

                    we caught at it

breaking the skin

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.