November 2008
64 posts
GLASSMAKERS
Glassmakers light huge fires and stir their blood and sweat into the materials that boil transparent in their crucibles. Then, with what’s left of their strength, they pour the glass into plates and roll it completely smooth.
And when the sun comes up they carry light to the cities and to the smallest village huts.
Sometimes they are called laborers, at other times, poets— though one...
Dennis Brutus
I am the exile am the wanderer the troubadour (whatever they say) gentle I am, and calm and with abstracted pace absorbed in planning, courteous to servility but wailings fill the chambers of my heart and in my head behind my quiet eyes I hear the cries and sirens
***
[LETTERS TO MARTHA AND OTHER POEMS - AFTER EXILE]
Song of Childhood By Peter Handke
When the child was a child It walked with its arms swinging, wanted the brook to be a river, the river to be a torrent, and this puddle to be the sea.
When the child was a child, it didn’t know that it was a child, everything was soulful, and all souls were one.
When the child was a child, it had no opinion about...
Body and Soul II
by Charles Wright
(for Coleman Hawkins)
The structure of landscape is infinitesimal, Like the structure of music, —— seamless, invisible. Even the rain has larger sutures. What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together, Is faith, it appears—faith of the eye, faith of the ear. Nothing like that in language, However, clouds chugging from west...
The Tropics of New York
by Claude McKay
Bananas ripe and green, and ginger root Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit, Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs, Sat in the window, bringing memories of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, And dewy dawns, and mystical skies In benediction over nun-like hills. My eyes grow dim, and I could no more...
Daniel Davidson - Apart the Crowd →
Blink slowly you’ll miss it the certainty, the foliage bending in imitation, increasing.
My days pass like dry leaves.
To ride in a vehicle of grass and earth becomes simple, a glance of propriety reaching deep into the covered ground.
Suspended three stories away a disaster in a pocket of sound here beneath our feet, my feet
participate in the future, when the speaking air is as rich a...
The Aesthetics of the Fragment - Robert Gibbons →
I go for that, I told them in an essay: the notebook, fragment, random jotting. Not without purpose, not just anything, but the result of desire & impetus. Out here on the balcony with the dahlias having weathered wind, thunder, lightning, (they didn’t flinch), drinking rain in all night overnight, both pots growing from toddlers to adolescents in half a day. Keeping me company in lieu of any...
THE ARBOR - Sappho (transl. by Guy Davenport)
He seems to be a god, that man Facing you, who leans to be close, Smiles, and, alert and glad, listens To your mellow voice And quickens in love at your laughter That stings my breasts, jolts my heart If I dare the shock of a glance. I cannot speak, My tongue sticks to my dry mouth, Thin fire spreads beneath my skin, My eyes cannot see and my aching ears Roar in their labyrinths. Chill sweat...
Lawrence Ferlinghetti: from "A Coney Island of the... →
10
I have not lain with beauty all my life telling over to myself its most rife charms I have not lain with beauty all my life and lied with it as well telling over to myself...
Tomaž Šalamun - Folk Song
Every true poet is a monster.
He destroys people and their speech.
His singing elevates a technique that wipes out
the earth so we are not eaten by worms.
The drunk sells his coat.
The thief sells his mother.
Only the poet sells his soul to separate it
from the body that he loves.
(Transl.: Charles Simic, 2002)
Augustus Young - The Albesia in Season →
When my flowering tree comes into its own the birds sing in it for a day and a night. O folie bergère of pink and white blossom, fluffy boa feathers. Honey is their delight.
Mountain swallows. No one sees them alight. Little pecking birds that drink to clear their throats, carousing the air with many-coloured notes. When the source has been sucked dry, the birds take flight and the blossoms...
Sean Mac Falls - Blueberry Picking
Blueberry picking was no chore. In the hoary-head of blue things, Stuff was easy, and ripe for the picking, Bunching blue-baubles in baskets over-ripened Of berries. On special mornings, due southwest In lazy hills, round my home, — bells Were breaking, in quiet sections of the Canton, Massachusetts woods, and playing by them, We rounded blue notes, some friends and I, Plucked-out tunes to the...
Jack Kerouac and Joe Strummer: MacDougal Street...
A Taste of Charles Olson →
A FOOT IS TO KICK WITH
“Prosody is the articulation of the total sound of a poem”
It’s got a kick in it What a kicker Mid-field a 12 horse-power kicker You got a kick? Go tell it to City Hall It’s as though you were hearing for the first time—who knows what a poem ought to sound like? until it’s thar? And how do you get it thar except as you...
Rainer Maria Rilke: Harvest Day →
Lord: it is time. The summer was huge. Now:
Lay your shadows across the sun dials,
and let the winds loose on the fields.
-
Command the last fruit to ripen;
give it two more Southern days,
force it to completion and chase
its last sweetness into the heavy wine
-
He who has no house by now shall not build one.
He who is alone shall stay so for long,
shall watch, read, write long letters
and wander...
Gary Snyder - How Poetry Comes to Me
It comes blundering over the Boulders at night, it stays Frightened outside the Range of my campfire I go to meet it at the Edge of the light
Elizabeth Bishop - The End of March
For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury It was cold and windy, scarcely the day to take a walk on that long beach Everything was withdrawn as far as possible, indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, seabirds in ones or twos. The rackety, icy, offshore wind numbed our faces on one side; disrupted the formation of a lone flight of Canada geese; and blew...
Joseph Epstein on the 'office' of Poet Laureate
“Allen Ginsberg is a stellar example of someone who could never have been poet laureate. Some years ago I was told about an official award given to Ginsberg in which the master of ceremonies took time out to thank Ginsberg for his courage in coming out so early and so openly as a homosexual at a time when it took real courage to do so, making the way easier for men like him, the master of...
Mary Jo Bang - Definitely
What is desire But the hard wire argument given To the mind’s unstoppable mouth. Inside the braincase, it’s I Want that fills every blank. And then the hand Reaches for the pleasure The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes, It will all be fine in some future soon. Definitely. I’ve conjured a body In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it. Here memory makes you...
William Stafford - Lit Instructor
Day after day up there beating my wings with all the softness truth requires I feel them shrug whenever I pause: they class my voice among tentative things,
And they credit fact, force, battering. I dance my way toward the family of knowing, embracing stray error as a long-lost boy and bringing him home with my fluttering.
Every quick feather asserts a just claim; it bites like a...
Anne Sexton - The Truth the Dead Know
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959 and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church, refusing the stiff procession to the grave, letting the dead ride alone in the hearse. It is June. I am tired of being brave. We drive to the Cape. I cultivate myself where the sun gutters from the sky, where the sea swings in like an iron gate and we touch. In...
Muriel Rukeyser - The Conjugation of the...
This has nothing to do with propagating
The species is continued as so many are (among the smaller creatures) by fission
(and this species is very small next in order to the amoeba, the beginning one)
The paramecium achieves, then, immortality by dividing
But when the paramecium desires renewal strength another joy this is what the paramecium does:
The paramecium lies down beside another...
Improvisation in Beijing by Allen Ginsberg
I write poetry because the English word Inspiration comes from Latin Spiritus, breath, and I want to breathe freely. I write poetry because Walt Whitman gave world permission to speak with candor. I write poetry because Walt Whitman opened up poetry’s verse-line for unobstructed breath. I write poetry because Ezra Pound saw an ivory tower, bet on one wrong horse, gave poets permission to write...
Infomercial 2 - John Ashbery's Election Day poem,...
The old mule delivers the goods. Nugatory diddlings are on the decline. Stateliness has its day.
There are indeed many encouraging signs in the weather and in handshakes. Still there are those who mistake dark clouds for raffish hucksterism. They have never savored the elation of an empty crystal ball.
To them I say, seconds will call upon you in the morning. Tonight there are dreams to be...
John Wieners: A Poem for Vipers
~~~~
I sit in Lees. At 11:40 PM with Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me Ju Ju. Hot on the table before us shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom chow yuke. Up the street under the wheels of a strange car is his stash—The ritual. We make it. And have made it. For months now together after midnight. Soon I know the fuzz will interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and I shall be placed on probation. The poem...
