Lumpy pudding

Kenneth Patchen, b. Dec. 13, 1911 (d. 1972) Below, one of his...

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 12:12:00 +0100

Kenneth Patchen, b. Dec. 13, 1911 (d. 1972)

Below, one of his picture poems: What the Story Tells Itself

Art by Ben Shahn, illustrating Rilke’s The Notebooks of...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:52:25 +0100

Art by Ben Shahn, illustrating Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910

“For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men, and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them when they are many, and one must have the great patience to wait until they come again. For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless, and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.”

Art by Cy Twombly, incorporating lines from Rilke’s The...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:50:42 +0100

Art by Cy Twombly, incorporating lines from Rilke’s The Rose

CY TWOMBLY: The Rose (V), 2008 - Acrylic on plywood

Another photo of Rilke and Lou, this time on the left hand side...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:48:48 +0100

Another photo of Rilke and Lou, this time on the left hand side of the image…

“Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Later, “Rilke called two places his home: Bohemia and Russia.”” (Wiki)

Dec. 4 is the birthday of Austrian poet Rainer-Maria Rilke (1875...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:46:23 +0100

Dec. 4 is the birthday of Austrian poet Rainer-Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)…

Among the many women in Rilke’s life was Lou Andreas-Salomé with whom he twice travelled to Russia…

Photo taken on one of these journeys, Rilke and Salomé are the two figures on the right hand side of the image…

Rainer Maria Rilke: Evening Slowly the evening changes into the...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 18:16:40 +0100

Rainer Maria Rilke: Evening

Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you look: and two worlds grow separate from you,
one ascending to heaven, another, that falls;

and leave you, belonging not wholly to either one,
not quite as dark as the house that remains silent,
not quite as certainly sworn to eternity
as that which becomes star each night and rises—

and leave you (unsayably to disentangle) your life
with all its immensity and fear and great ripening,
so that, all but bounded, all but understood,
it is by turns stone in you and star.

(transl. by Cliff Crego)

Photo © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz

Old Masters by Camelia Elias For T.T. Behind the curtain on...

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:21:15 +0100

Old Masters by Camelia Elias

For T.T.

Behind the curtain on Christmas Eve my mother’s voice merges with Bishop’s: “The art of losing isn’t hard to master / so many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.” Mother’s voice is as soft as the softest rain: “Watch now, how men will lose their one chance to kiss the alabaster of my face.” Widows and lesbian lovers “Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. / The art of losing isn’t hard to master.” “— Is she at home or not,” the horny men ask, but hers is not the task to answer to the charge of forgery and fidelity in life and in disaster. “I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, / some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. / I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.” The sounds get intense, and men’s excitement turns into a disaster. “This is a disaster,” they all shout. “Every year the same thing. It’s Christmas for Christ’s sake, indulge our lust, for once, and be a sport.” But “No,” she says, with Echo as her partner, practicing the art of losing even faster, one art which I am made to see as she refers once more to some disaster: “ — Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture / I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident / the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.” “I’m listening,” I say, “But if it is as if it looks like it, like a disaster, then why do I have to write it, when those intended for, this writing of disaster, go back to eating, or opening their windows, disgruntled so by their fail to muster, or is it master, you?” “— Don’t move,” I say, “I’m painting you as implacable. Me, as lightness of touch on your lips, so that the one you’re waiting for will come at last. At last.”

Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or...

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:57:00 +0100

Whoever degrades another degrades me, and whatever is done or said returns at last to me —Walt Whitman.

From the series Great Ideas of Western Man, 1958 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

Artist: Lee Mullican (b. Dec. 2, 1919)

Under an Image by Paul Celan Raven-swarmed waves of grainThe...

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:09:00 +0100

Under an Image by Paul Celan

Raven-swarmed waves of grain
The blue of which heaven? The lower? The upper?
Belated arrow that rushed from the soul
A louder whirr. A nearer glow. Both worlds.

(Transl., Bent Sørensen)

Sweet Romanian Tongue by James SchuylerDrew down the curse of...

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 00:39:21 +0100

Sweet Romanian Tongue by James Schuyler

Drew down the curse of heaven on her umbrella
furled and smelling of wet cigarettes,
Jo ran off in rain one pitchy night,
one bloody a.m. found her staring, snoring.

“Why do we all stay up so late?” Jo queried.
“Though I don’t stay up so late as my friends.”
She tripped the little bomb of wasps.
They got her.

Tears for Jo, four, each perfect, waspish.
A silver tongue and piss-blond hair
decants a funeral oblation for the mouse.
“She was a rare sight, a winning wonder.
Jo cultivates her toothaches elsewhere.”

(Source: Poetry, November 2009)

3 Pages by Ted Berrigan For Jack Collom 10 Things I do Every...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:59:45 +0100

3 Pages by Ted Berrigan

For Jack Collom

10 Things I do Every Day

play poker
drink beer
smoke pot
jack off
curse

BY THE WATERS OF MANHATTAN

flower

positive & negative

go home

read lunch poems

hunker down

changes

Life goes by
quite merrily
blue
NO HELP WANTED

Hunting For The Whale

“and if the weather plays me fair
I’m happy every day.”

The white that dries clear
the heart attack
the congressional medal of honor
A house in the country

NOT ENOUGH

Take the I Out by Sharon OldsBut I love the I, steel I-beamthat...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:54:30 +0100

Take the I Out by Sharon Olds

But I love the I, steel I-beam
that my father sold. They poured the pig iron
into the mold, and it fed out slowly,
a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,
Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he
marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream
of Wheat, its curl of butter right
in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses
with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning
and sour in the evening. I love the I,
frail between its flitches, its hard ground
and hard sky, it soars between them
like the soul that rushes, back and forth,
between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,
how would it have felt to be the strut
joining the floor and roof of the truss?
I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years
in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled
slope of her temperature rising, and on
the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach
the crest, the Roman numeral I—
I, I, I, I,
girders of identity, head on,
embedded in the poem. I love the I
for its premise of existence—our I—when I was
born, part gelid, I lay with you
on the cooling table, we were all there, a
forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,
resinous, flammable root to crown,
which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

Harry Crosby: Roots tall ancestral tongues in unto the root...

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 12:32:03 +0100

Harry Crosby: Roots

tall ancestral

tongues in

unto the root of

dark-fingered

as the needle to the pole

as the shadow to the sun

fungi and mushrooms

and the root of a tree

dark-fingered

thrusting into

infinity

(1929)

Photo: Harry Crosby: Toy Horse against Mill

- Mina Loy: from Songs to Joannes, 1917, published in Others,...

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:01:55 +0100

- Mina Loy: from Songs to Joannes, 1917, published in Others, April 1917, Vol.3, No. 6

Photo of Mina Loy by Stephen Haweis

From Barry Miles: The Beat Hotel (Google Books) Ecce Homo -...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:20:36 +0100

From Barry Miles: The Beat Hotel (Google Books)

Ecce Homo - David Gascoyne

Whose is this horrifying face,
This putrid flesh, discouloured, flayed,
Fed on by flies, scorched by the sun?
Whose are these hollow red-filmed eyes
And thorn-spiked head and spear-stuck side?
Behold the Man: He is Man’s Son.

Forget the legend, tear the decent veil
That cowardice or interest devised
To make their mortal enemy a friend,
To hide the bitter truth all His wounds tell,
Lest the great scandal be no more disguised:
He is in agony till the world’s end,

And we must never sleep during that time!
He is suspended on the cross-tree now
And we are onlookers at the crime,

Callous contemporaries of the slow
Torture of God. Here is the hill
Made ghastly by His spattered blood

Whereon He hangs and suffers still:
See, the centurions wear riding-boots,
Black shirts and badges and peaked caps,
Greet one another with raised-arm salutes;
They have cold eyes, unsmiling lips;
Yet these His brothers know not what they do.

And on his either side hang dead
A labourer and a factory hand,
Or one is maybe a lynched Jew
And one a Negro or a Red,
Coolie or Ethiopian, Irishman,
Spaniard or German democrat.

Behind his lolling head the sky
Glares like a fiery cataract
Red with the murders of two thousand years
Committed in His name and by
Crusaders, Christian warriors
Defending faith and property.

Amid the plain beneath His transfixed hands,
Exuding darkness as indelible
As guilty stains, fanned by funereal
And lurid airs, besieged by drifting sands
And clefted landslides our about-to-be
Bombed and abandoned cities stand.

He who wept for Jersualem
Now sees His prophecy extend
Across the greatest cities of the world,
A guilty panic reason cannot stem
Rising to raze them all as He foretold;
Across the greatest cities of the world,
A guilty panic reason cannot stem,
Rising to raze them all as He foretold;
And He must watch this drama to the end.

Though often named, He is unknown
To the dark kingdoms at His feet
Where everything disparages His words,

And each man bears the common guilt alone
And goes blindfolded to his fate,
And fear and greed are sovereign lords.

The turning point of history
Must come. Yet the complacent and the proud
And who exploit and kill, may be denied–
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry-
The resurrection and the life
Wrought by your spirit’s blood.

Not from a monstrance silver-wrought
But from the tree of human pain
Redeem our sterile misery,
Christ of Revolution and of Poetry,
That man’s long journey
May not have been in vain.

— from Poems 1937-1942

The End is Near the Beginning Yes you have said enough for the...

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 15:01:00 +0100

The End is Near the Beginning

Yes you have said enough for the time being
There will be plenty of lace later on
Plenty of electric wool
And you will forget the eglantine
Growing around the edge of the green lake
And if you forget the colour of my hands
You will remember the wheels of the chair
In which the wax figure resembling you sat

Several men are standing on the pier
Unloading the sea
The device on the trolly says MOTHER’S MEAT
Which means Until the end.

David Gascoyne

Finding the names of birds here,of flowers, important, I say...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:36:49 +0100

Finding the names of birds here,
of flowers, important, I say I must
know them, name them,
to be able
to call upon where their magic
resides for me: in naming them
myself–to lay hold upon whatever
quivers inside the bird-calls,
the dripping
of tail of wing–
to know it
inside my hand where power
of that sort lives
& in my fingers
wakes and becomes
an act of
language.

–Hilda Morley

C.K. Williams - Love: BeginningsThey’re at that stage where so...

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:22:20 +0100

C.K. Williams - Love: Beginnings

They’re at that stage where so much desire streams between them, so much frank need and want,
so much absorption in the other and the self and the self-admiring entity and unity they make—
her mouth so full, breast so lifted, head thrown back so far in her laughter at his laughter,
he so solid, planted, oaky, firm, so resonantly factual in the headiness of being craved so,
she almost wreathed upon him as they intertwine again, touch again, cheek, lip, shoulder, brow,
every glance moving toward the sexual, every glance away soaring back in flame into the sexual—
that just to watch them is to feel again that hitching in the groin, that filling of the heart,
the old, sore heart, the battered, foundered, faithful heart, snorting again, stamping in its stall.

Infight among the Romantics (source): “Writing to his...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 21:21:22 +0100

Infight among the Romantics (source):

“Writing to his publisher in 1820, Lord Byron declared: “No more Keats, I entreat: flay him alive; if some of you don’t I must skin him myself: there is no bearing the drivelling idiotism of the Mankin.”

For good measure, he described Keats’s work as “neither poetry nor anything else but a Bedlam vision produced by raw pork and opium”.

In turn, Byron got it in the neck from Percy Bysshe Shelley, who described his fellow poet’s work as “mischievous insanity”. Shelley blamed this on Byron’s taste for “disgusting” and “bigoted” Italian women who smelt “so strongly of garlic that an ordinary Englishman cannot approach them”.”

Keats didn’t comment - he was too busy dying…

Keats, d. 1821, at 26

Shelley, d. 1822, at 29

Byron, d. 1824, last man standing, at 36

Dylan Thomas: POEM IN OCTOBER It was my thirtieth year to...

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:18:20 +0100

Dylan Thomas: POEM IN OCTOBER

It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
And the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested shore
The morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the webbed wall
Myself to set foot
That second
In the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In a rainy autumn
And walked abroad in shower of all my days
High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
Over the border
And the gates
Of the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
Blackbirds and the sun of October
Summery
On the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
To the rain wringing
Wind blow cold
In the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
With its horns through mist and the castle
Brown as owls
But all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
There could I marvel
My birthday
Away but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue altered sky
Streamed again a wonder of summer
With apples
Pears and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
Through the parables
Of sunlight
And the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
These were the woods the river and the sea
Where a boy
In the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
And the mystery
Sang alive
Still in the water and singing birds.

And there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around. And the true
Joy of the long dead child sang burning
In the sun.
It was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
O may my heart’s truth
Still be sung
On this high hill in a year’s turning.

***************

Croquet on the cliffside lawn at Pennard, Gower when Dylan and Caitlin Thomas were visiting Vernon Watkins in 1937. Photo by Watkins….