Lumpy pudding

Gregory Corso: Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem

There’s a truth limits man
A truth prevents his going any farther
The world is changing
The world knows it’s changing
Heavy is the sorrow of the day
The old have the look of doom
The young mistake their fate in that look
That is truth
But it isn’t all truth

Life has meaning
And I do not know the meaning
Even when I felt it were meaningless
I hoped and prayed and sought a meaning
It wasn’t all frolic poesy
There were dues to pay
Summoning Death and God
I’d a wild dare to tackle Them
Death proved meaningless without Life
Yes the world is changing
But Death remains the same
It takes man away from Life
The only meaning he knows
And usually it is a sad business
This Death

I’d an innocence I’d a seriousness
I’d a humor save me from amateur philosophy
I am able to contradict my beliefs
I am able able
Because I want to know the meaning of everything
Yet sit I like a brokenness
Moaning: Oh what responsibility
I put on thee Gregory
Death and God
Hard hard it’s hard

I learned life were no dream
I learned truth deceived
Man is not God
Life is a century
Death an instant

——

Gregory Corso, “Writ on the Steps of Puerto Rican Harlem” from Long Live Man. Copyright © 1962 by New Directions Publishing Corporation

Osip Mandelstam:

Alone I stare into the frost’s white face.
It’s going nowhere, and I—from nowhere.
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:
Miraculous, the breathing plain.

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease …
The ten-fold forest almost the same …
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.

                                                         — Jan. 16, 1937

—

(Translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich)

Recent acquisition - Charles Olson’s first ‘collection’, consisting on only 5 poems, w. illustrations by Corrado Cagli. Published by Black Sun Press, 1950

From La Préface:

“Birth in the house is the One of Sticks, cunnus in the crotch.”

The old haiku masters’ take on New Year’s…

New Year’s Day
   my hovel
the same as ever
                — Issa (1763 - 1827)

Has spring already come?
   I feel wealthy this New Year
with five sho of old rice
                — Basho (1644-94)

New Year’s Day
  nothing good or bad -
just human beings
                — Shiki (1867 - 1902)

—

Above - portrait of Basho by his patron Sugiyama Sanpu (1647 - 1732)

Charles Olson: Variations Done for Gerald Van De Wiele

I. Le Bonheur

dogwood flakes
what is green

the petals
from the apple
blow on the road

mourning doves
mark the sway
of the afternoon, bees
dig the plum blossoms

the morning
stands up straight, the night
is blue from the full of the April moon

iris and lilac, birds
birds, yellow flowers
white flowers, the Diesel
does not let up dragging
the plow

as the whippoorwill,
the night’s tractor, grinds
his song


and no other birds but us
are as busy (O saisons, O chateaux!
Délires!

What soul
is without fault?

Nobody studies
happiness

Every time the cock crows
I salute him

I have no longer any excuse
for envy. My life

has been given its orders: the seasons
seize

the soul and the body, and make mock
of any dispersed effort. The hour of death

is the only trespass


II. The Charge

dogwood flakes
the green

the petals from the apple-trees
fall for the feet to walk on

the birds are so many they are
loud, in the afternoon

they distract, as so many bees do
suddenly all over the place

With spring one knows today to see
that in the morning each thing

is separate but by noon
they have melted into each other

and by night only crazy things
like the full moon and the whippoorwill

and us, are busy. We are busy
if we can get by that whiskered bird,

that nightjar, and get across, the moon
is our conversation, she will say

what soul
isn’t in default?

can you afford not to make
the magical study

which happiness is? do you hear
the cock when he crows? do you know the charge,

that you shall have no envy, that your life
has its orders, that the seasons

seize you too, that no body and soul are one
if they are not wrought

in this retort? that otherwise efforts
are efforts? And that the hour of your flight

will be the hour of your death?


III. Spring

The dogwood
lights up the day.

The April moon
flakes the night.

Birds, suddenly,
are a multitude

The flowers are ravined
by bees, the fruit blossoms

are thrown to the ground, the wind
the rain forces everything. Noise—

even the night is drummed
by whippoorwills, and we get

as busy, we plow, we move,
we break out, we love. The secret

which got lost neither hides
nor reveals itself, it shows forth

tokens. And we rush
to catch up. The body

whips the soul. In its great desire
it demands the elixir

In the roar of spring,
transmutations. Envy

drags herself off. The fault of the body and the soul
—that they are not one—

the matutinal cock clangs
and singleness: we salute you

season of no bungling

—

Photo of Olson at Black Mountain College, ca. 1955 - Jonathan Williams

Extract from letter from Muriel Rukeyser to Ezra Pound, 1932 (The Beinecke)

Part of dust jacket of Muriel Rukeyser’s book of poems U.S. 1, 1938 (The Beinecke)

Muriel Rukeyser: Night Feeding

Deeper than sleep but not so deep as death
I lay there dreaming and my magic head
remembered and forgot. On first cry I
remembered and forgot and did believe.
I knew love and I knew evil:
woke to the burning song and the tree burning blind,
despair of our days and the calm milk-giver who
knows sleep, knows growth, the sex of fire and grass,
renewal of all waters and the time of the stars
and the black snake with gold bones.

Black sleeps, gold burns; on second cry I woke
fully and gave to feed and fed on feeding.
Gold seed, green pain, my wizards in the earth
walked through the house, black in the morning dark.
Shadows grew in my veins, my bright belief,
my head of dreams deeper than night and sleep.
Voices of all black animals crying to drink,
cries of all birth arise, simple as we,
found in the leaves, in clouds and dark, in dream,
deep as this hour, ready again to sleep.

Rainer-Maria Rilke: Day in Autumn

After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city’s avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

— transl. Mary Kinzie, Poetry 2008

Nazim Hikmet: Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison
                                (trans. by Mutlu Konuk and Randy Blasing)

If instead of being hanged by the neck
    you’re thrown inside
    for not giving up hope
in the world, your country, and people,
    if you do ten or fifteen years
    apart from the time you have left,
you won’t say,
        “Better I had swung from the end of a rope
             like a flag”—
you’ll put your foot down and live.
It may not be a pleasure exactly,
but it’s your solemn duty
    to live one more day
       to spite the enemy.
Part of you may live alone inside,
    like a stone at the bottom of a well.
But the other part
    must be so caught up
    in the flurry of the world
       that you shiver there inside
    when outside, at forty days’ distance, a leaf moves.
To wait for letters inside,
to sing sad songs,
or to lie awake all night staring at the ceiling
          is sweet but dangerous.
Look at your face from shave to shave,
forget your age,
watch out for lice
              and for spring nights,
      and always remember
         to eat every last piece of bread—
also, don’t forget to laugh heartily.
And who knows,
the woman you love may stop loving you.
Don’t say it’s no big thing:
it’s like the snapping of a green branch
                         to the man inside.
To think of roses and gardens inside is bad,
to think of seas and mountains is good.
Read and write without rest,
and I also advise weaving
and making mirrors.
I mean, it’s not that you can’t pass
               ten or fifteen years inside
                                            and more—
                    you can,
                    as long as the jewel
                    on the left side of your chest doesn’t lose its luster!

Sharon Olds…

Sharon Olds: Still Life in Landscape

It was night, it had rained, there were pieces of cars and
half-cars strewn, it was still, and bright,
a woman was lying on the highway, on her back,
with her head curled back and tucked under her shoulders
so the back of her head touched her spine
between her shoulder-blades, her clothes
mostly accidented off, and her
leg gone, a long bone
sticking out of the stub of her thigh—
this was her her abandoned matter,
my mother grabbed my head and turned it and
clamped it into her chest, between
her breasts. My father was driving—not sober
but not in this accident, we’d approached it out of
neutral twilight, broken glass
on wet black macadam, like an underlying
midnight abristle with stars. This was
the world—maybe the only one.
The dead woman was not the person
my father had recently almost run over,
who had suddenly leapt away from our family
car, jerking back from death,
she was not I, she was not my mother,
but maybe she was a model of the mortal,
the elements ranged around her on the tar—
glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family.

—

Image - Matt Valentine, 2003

Bird-Understander by Craig Arnold

Of many reasons I love you here is one

the way you write me from the gate at the airport
so I can tell you everything will be alright

so you can tell me there is a bird
trapped in the terminal     all the people
ignoring it    because they do not know
what do with it    except to leave it alone
until it scares itself to death

it makes you terribly terribly sad

You wish you could take the bird outside
and set it free or    (failing that)
call a bird-understander
to come help the bird

All you can do is notice the bird
and feel for the bird     and write
to tell me how language feels
impossibly useless

but you are wrong

You are a bird-understander
better than I could ever be
who make so many noises
and call them song

These are your own words
your way of noticing
and saying plainly
of not turning away
from hurt

you have offered them
to me     I am only
giving them back

if only I could show you
how very useless
they are not

Those Various Scalpels by Marianne Moore

Those
various sounds, consistently indistinct, like intermingled echoes
    struck from thin glasses successively at random—
       the inflection disguised: your hair, the tails of two
fighting-cocks head to head in stone—
    like sculptured scimitars repeating the curve of your
       ears in reverse order:
                                                                    your eyes,
     flowers of ice and snow

sown by tearing winds on the cordage of disabled ships: your
    raised hand
an ambiguous signature: your cheeks, those rosettes
    of blood on the stone floors of French châteaux,
with regard to which the guides are so affirmative—
    your other hand

a bundle of lances all alike, partly hid by emeralds from Persia
    and the fractional magnificence of Florentine
       goldwork—a collection of little objects—
sapphires set with emeralds, and pearls with a moonstone, made fine
    with enamel in gray, yellow, and dragonfly blue;
       a lemon, a pear

and three bunches of grapes, tied with silver: your dress, a magnificent square
cathedral tower of uniform
    and at the same time diverse appearance—a
species of vertical vineyard, rustling in the storm
    of conventional opinion—are they weapons or scalpels?
        Whetted to brilliance

by the hard majesty of that sophistication which is superior to opportunity,
these things are rich instruments with which to experiment.
    But why dissect destiny with instruments
    more highly specialized than the components of destiny
       itself?

—

Photo: Carl Van Vechten, Nov. 1, 1948 (The Beinecke)