— Ron Padgett

Up goes the mad scientist to the room in his tower
where his instruments gleam in the half-light
while his thoughts are surrounded by the half-dark
that filters out from his heart, but when he goes in
and looks around, all he can see is the chair
covered with a bright red and green serape
and sparks are fizzing in the thought balloon
above his head, for yes, he is a cartoon scientist
just as everything I think about is a cartoon something
because anything cartoon is immortal
in its own funny little way.

Posted at 11:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— Joy Harjo

how can you stand it
he said
the hot oklahoma summers
where you were born
this humid thick air
is choking me
and i want to go back
to new mexico

it is the only way
i know how to breathe
an ancient chant
that my mother knew
came out of a history
woven from wet tall grass
in her womb
and i know no other way
than to surround my voice
with the summer songs of crickets
in this moist south night air

oklahoma will be the last song
i'll ever sing

Posted at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— Mary Oliver

Out of the sump rise the marigolds.
From the rim of the marsh, muslin with mosquitoes,
rises the egret, in his cloud-cloth.
Through the soft rain, like mist, and mica,
the withered acres of moss begin again.

When I have to die, I would like to die
on a day of rain—
long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.

And I would like to have whatever little ceremony there might be
take place while the rain is shoveled and shoveled out of the sky,

and anyone who comes must travel, slowly and with thought,
as around the edges of the great swamp.

(I picked up a copy of Oliver’s New and Selected Poems, Vol. One after finding her online a few weeks ago. Her imagery is much more nature-based than what I’m accustomed to, but quite a few of the poems really work for me. Most particularly this one, for obvious reasons.

Also, when I selected this quarter’s banner art I never imagined the events that would come to pass, or what it would be like to look at that one sharply focused gravestone every time I come to my blog.)

Posted at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

— ee cummings

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it’s sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there’s never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

(via In a Dark Time)

Posted at 8:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— John Keats

ST. AGNES’ Eve—Ah, bitter chill it was!
The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold;
The hare limp’d trembling through the frozen grass,
And silent was the flock in woolly fold:
Numb were the Beadsman’s fingers, while he told
His rosary, and while his frosted breath,
Like pious incense from a censer old,
Seem’d taking flight for heaven, without a death,
Past the sweet Virgin’s picture, while his prayer he saith.

Posted at 7:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

From the first stanza of And the Stars Were Shining, by John Ashbery:

It was the solstice, and it was jumping on you like a friendly dog.
The stars were still out in the field,
and the child prostitutes plied their trade,
the only happy ones, having learned how unhappiness sticks
and will not risk being traded in for a song or a balloon.
Christmas decorations were getting crumpled in offices
by staffers slumped at their video terminals,
and dismay articulated otherness in orphan asylums
where the coffee percolates eternally, and God is not light
but God, as mysterious to Himself as we are to Him.

Posted at 1:09 PM | Permalink

Chrysanthemums: some as big as a baby’s head. Bundles of curled penny-colored leaves with flickering lavender underhues. “Chrysanthemums,” my friend commented as we moved through our gardens stalking flower-show blossoms with decapitating shears, “are like lions. Kingly characters. I always expect them to spring. To turn on me with a growl and a roar.”

It was the kind of remark that caused people to wonder about Miss Sook, though I understand that only in retrospect, for I always knew just what she meant, and in this instance the whole idea of it, the notion of lugging all those growling gorgeous roaring lions into the house and caging them in tacky cases (our final decorative act on Thanksgiving Eve) made us so giggly and giddy and stupid we were soon out of breath.

Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor, 83-84.

Posted at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— Stephen Dobyns

My stepdaughter and I circle round and round.
You see, I like the music loud, the speakers
throbbing, jam-packing the room with sound whether
Bach or rock and roll, the volume cranked up so
each bass notes is like a hand smacking the gut.
But my stepdaughter disagrees. She is four
and likes the music decorous, pitched below
her own voice-that tenuous projection of self.
With music blasting, she feels she disappears,
is lost within the blare, which in fact I like.
But at four what she wants is self-location
and uses her voice as a porpoise uses
its sonar: to find herself in all this space.
If she had a sort of box with a peephole
and looked inside, what she'd like to see would be
herself standing there in her red pants, jacket,
yellow plastic lunch box: a proper subject
for serious study. But me, if I raised
the same box to my eye, I would wish to find
the ocean on one of those days when wind
and thick cloud make the water gray and restless
as if some creature brooded underneath,
a rocky coast with a road along the shore
where someone like me was walking and has gone.
Loud music does this, it wipes out the ego,
leaving turbulent water and winding road,
a landscape stripped of people and language-
how clear the air becomes, how sharp the colors.

(Via Scrivener, who has a new home.)

Posted at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bobbi posted this poem a couple of days ago. It’s one of the best explanations of a particular aspect of introversion that I’ve come across. There are other reasons for being an introvert, of course, but part of mine does have to do with living the life I want as much as I can. That translates to consciously choosing social occasions whenever possible, rather than going to everything regardless of how much it does or doesn’t matter.

As Much As You Can
Constantine P. Cavafy

Even if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.
Do not degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social relations and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

Posted at 10:22 AM | Permalink

— Wallace Stevens

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.

Posted at 10:25 PM | Permalink

What do the few read for? “The nearest I have yet got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. … We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. … One of the things we feel after reading a great work is ‘I have got out.’ … Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre.” Here, for Lewis, is the vital center of reading: “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege … But in reading great literature I become a thousand men, and yet remain myself.”

Mostly C.S. Lewis, qtd in Lanham, The Economics of Attention, 149

Posted at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(Just because it’s a Brit Lit 101 poem doesn’t mean Marvell’s not rockin’. Plus, it’s been stuck in my head the past few days.)

Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at slower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found,
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long preserv’d virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust.
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none I think do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may;
And now, like am’rous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour,
Than languish in his slow-chapp’d power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball;
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Posted at 1:07 PM | Permalink

Perfection. Thanks, boynton (who also points to authors who write in the buff.)

Posted at 1:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

— Aaron Anstett

In the morning, before breakfast, I save my own life,
then walk around the house all day a hero.
Friends come by and ask how it feels.
I say it just happened. I couldn't help it.
They'd do the same in my shoes. I don't tell them how,
before I knew it, something raced down my fingers
and my feet. Something made me strong.
It crowded itself in my arms and my heart
and filled me up with as strange and kind a feeling
as I could remember, and suddenly I knew nothing
but I had to help that guy. It wasn't words. No voice
told me. It was more like light behind my eyes, weight
pressing in from every direction. High notes pierced me,
and it was clear what I had to do.

Posted at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

by Andrew Hudgins

After the tenant moved out, died, disappeared—
the stories vary—the landlord
walked downstairs, bemused, and told his wife,
"There's a Cadillac in the attic,"

and there was. An old one, sure, and one
with sloppy paint, bald tires,
and orange rust chewing at the rocker panels,
but still and all, a Cadillac in the attic.

He'd battled transmission, chassis, engine block,
even the huge bench seats,
up the folding stairs, heaved them through the trapdoor,
and rebuilt a Cadillac in the attic.

Why'd he do it? we asked. But we know why.
For the reasons we would do it: for the looks
of astonishment he'd never see but could imagine.
For the joke. A Cadillac in the attic!

And for the meaning, though we aren't sure what it means.
And of course he did it for pleasure,
the pleasure on his lips of all those short vowels
and three hard clicks: the Cadillac in the attic.

Posted at 1:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— Carol Connolly

I am a full-time fraud,
passing as a poet.
It's filthy work. But
someone has to do it.
Stilted syllables
line my walls,
confusion
crowds my room
with maggoty mounds
of mediocre metaphors
ridicule lurks
in my hallway
ambitious people
take all the best lines,
and I have a headache.
I woke up with it. But
everyone wakes up
with something.

Posted at 7:01 PM | Permalink

William Styron has passed away. He was one of the first great contemporary Southern writers I read, and I spent a spring consuming Sophie’s Choice, A Tidewater Morning, and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Each of them saturated me, and I had to wait a day or two before picking up something new to read. (I was also reading the Border Trilogy that season — I must have been craving intensity — and he and Cormac McCarthy are somehow intertwined in my mind. Did they like each other in real life? I don't know. Their techniques are so different, yet both so vast.) Later, I read Darkness Visible and thought “Yes, that’s it exactly.” Nobody else has written about depression with the clarity and lyricism that Styron did. I doubt anyone will.

I really liked knowing he was around in the world.

Posted at 7:08 AM | Permalink

During the final semester of my Lit degree, I took Modern Novel, Approaches to Lit, and most likely an STC requirement. I loathed my Approaches to Lit professor. He was universally disliked among both students and faculty, actually, for his general commitment to disagreeableness. In retrospect, I am kinder to him. He was tweedy (as I find myself becoming), he doggedly published novel upon novel in minor presses, and he taught us meticulous old-school MLA citation style. So old-school, in fact, that I still use some style marks that younger professors find unnecessary, but it’s paid off for me more often than not over the years.

And he taught Arnold’s Dover Beach up against Hecht’s Dover Bitch. It sticks with me, so much so that when anyone asks me about the former I always bring up the latter. It was the first retelling I had really considered, and I went on from there to Wicked, Lo’s Diary, Wide Sargasso Sea, The Wind Done Gone, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. And from there to derivative works and bumpety bump along to where I am now.

It’s not really that simple, probably. Without Dover Bitch, I would most likely still be right here, studying authorship and intellectual property. But one never knows, do one? And so I’ll post both poems beneath the fold, just for you.

Continue reading "Dover Beach / Dover Bitch" »

Posted at 8:50 PM | Permalink

Or, why I didn’t take exams but had a totally excellent summer that was productive in its own unforeseen way.

Miles driven: 6,000
States visited: 10
Childhood traveling dreams realized: numerous*
Professional conferences attended: 1
Consulting hours: several hundred
Interfaces wrangled and tested: 1
Alpha testing rounds completed: several
Interview Protocols developed: 1
Handbooks written: 1, 50 pages thereof
System Message Protocols developed: 1
Individual guide-participant messages developed as per protocol: 40
Semi-annual reports written: 1
Beta tests with live subjects launched: 1
Other logistical tasks completed: numerous
Non-exam books read: 16

• Atwood: The Little Black Book of Stories


• Rushdie: Step Across This Line


• Rushdie: The Satanic Verses


• Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy


• Fitzhugh: The Long Secret


• Rollins: Get In The Van


• Rollins: Black Coffee Blues


• Rollins: Do I Come Here Often?


• Rollins: Smile, You’re Traveling


• Epstein: Snobbery


• Spitz & Mullen: We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk


• Belsito & Davis: Hardcore California


• Goldburg: Writing Down the Bones


• Zerubavel: The Clockwork Muse**


• Fiore: The Now Habit**


• Proulx: Close Range

Was any of this what I intended to do with my summer? No.
Do I feel ready for anything the next year might hold? Yes. Bring it.

* In particular, for reasons of vindication: Mount Rushmore, the Mammoth Pits, and the Peabody Hotel.
** Thanks to Mel.

Posted at 9:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back in February, I decided I needed to read more fiction. And I have. This semester, I’ve worked in a fair amount of Annie Proulx: The Shipping News, That Old Ace in the Hole, and Accordion Crimes, which I’m about 70 pages into. I picked up Margaret Atwood’s Negotiating with the Dead, which consists of her Empson Lectures at Cambridge, and wolfed it down in a few days. (Alright, it ain’t fiction, but it’s about the writing of fiction.) On susansinclair’s advice I read The Eyre Affair, which is fabulously trashy fiction, on the way to Chicago and back.

My habit, which isn’t unusual, is to read several books at once. I haven’t been doing this with the fiction, instead mixing one novel or set of essays with all the work stuff, but this week things got out of hand. We went to Salman Rushdie’s lecture on campus Wednesday evening, and he was so brilliant and funny that we had to go straight to Barnes and Noble afterwards. And The Satanic Verses was the last thing of his I planned to buy, because it’s the cliche Rushdie novel and he’s written so many others, and of course it was what I ended up with. Along with Accordion Crimes, which I found in the used section for $5. And I couldn’t decide which to start on first. So I’m reading both, along with a stack of hypertext theory.

And that’s one of the interesting things about this whole experiment: the fiction hasn’t cut into my work reading at all. I read all the school stuff and I read all the other stuff. The trick is that reading has suddenly become fun again after the long slog of coursework. (For awhile, I wondered if graduate school had managed to permanently suck all the joy out of reading.) These novels have catapulted me back to my omnivorous self, and finally I find myself once more running out to read it all. Every last word of it.

Posted at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

— Louis Macneice

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes —
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands —
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Posted at 8:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Nutbeem’s news came from a shortwave radio that buzzed as though wracked by migraine. When the airwaves were clear it had a tenor hum, but snarled when auroral static crackled. Nutbeem lay across his desk, his ear close to the receiver, gleaning the waves, the yowling foreign voices, twisting the stories around to suit his mood of the day. The volume button was gone, and he turned it up or down by inserting the tip of a table knife in the metal slot and twisting. His corner smelled of radios — dust, heat, metal, wood, electricity, time.

E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News, 58

Posted at 9:08 AM | Permalink

— Theodore Roethke

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I'd have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)

How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)

Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)

Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I'm martyr to a motion not my own;
What's freedom for? To know eternity
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)

Posted at 7:04 PM | Permalink

Last month turned out to be the mildest January Minnesota has seen in 160 years, with no subzero temperatures and barely any snow on the ground. I have been saving this poem, by Edna St. Vincent Millay, for the next big snow storm that has never arrived. At least now temperatures are finally normal and we got several inches last night.

No hawk hangs over in this air:
The urgent snow is everywhere.
The wing adroiter than a sail
Must lean away from such a gale,
Abandoning its straight intent,
Or else expose tough ligament
And tender flesh to what before
Meant dampened feathers, nothing more.
Forceless upon our backs there fall
Infrequent flakes hexagonal,
Devised in many a curious style
To charm our safety for a while,
Where close to earth like mice we go
Under the horizontal snow.

Posted at 5:24 PM | Permalink

— Jake Adam York

I kept a load of shoulder sandwiches
and Circle Pork sausage deep in my rig
cause Penny wanted me to keep
the taste of home fresh on my lips,
the hickory strong on my tongue,
in my nose — so you can follow smoke home.
But halfway back from California,
every bit was gone.
I made Helotes empty,
then lay half asleep at the Flying J
till the smoke washed all around.
Just downhill, in his Steer-B-Q,
Eli Cook forked brisket, ribs,
and mesquite-sweet beef tacos vaqueros—
like me, a Memphis son, stalled here
years ago, happy to ease a brother’s luck,
but he hadn’t cooked a pig in years.
You eat a place, he said, it becomes a part of you.
Smoke teased from the pit, twisting
like fog off the rig’s slick wells,
like Penny’s voice, her follow smoke home.
But when its slim fingers curled,
seductive, toward the grill, I was gone.
Back home, she’d know me different,
smell it in my skin, sugar my engine
to keep me home. But when Eli
slid the plate before me, smoke rose,
I wasted little time —
I prayed forgiveness,
then polished every bone.

Posted at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

What with all the poetry blogging that’s going on lately in these parts, it seems like a good time to point folks to Loren at In A Dark Time. Loren is a retired English teacher who’s been doing this since 2001. He’s built up an amazing roster of poets on his sidebar and regularly manages to introduce me to new works I’ve never heard of. All of us johnny-come-lately poetry people would do well to head over there.

Plus, he was the first person to blogroll me when I began, plus I totally swiped the Patrick Lane poem I posted a few days back from him and forgot the hat-tip. So thanks, man, for all the good stuff over all these years.

Posted at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

— Patrick Lane

The gentle fears he tells me of being
afraid to climb back down each day
from the top of the unfinished building.
He says: I’m getting old
and wish each morning when I arrive
I could beat into shape
a scaffold to take me higher
but the wood I need
is still growing on the hills
the nails raw red with rust
still changing shape in bluffs
somewhere north of my mind.

I’ve hung over this city like a bird
and seen it change from shacks to towers
It’s not that I'm afraid
but sometimes when I’m alone up here
and know I can’t get higher
I think I’ll just walk off the edge
and either fall or fly
and then he laughs
so that his plumb-bob goes awry
and single strokes the spikes into the joists
pushing the floor another level higher
like a hawk every year adds levels to his nest
until he’s risen above the tree he builds on
and alone lifts into the wind
beating his wings like nails into the sky.

I’ve been poetry-blogging at random since not long after I began blogging. Jo(e)’s suggestion of Friday poems is wonderful, giving a rhythm to the whole thing. Although Tuesday poems are rather lovely too...

Posted at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I still have wild hope on the first day of any new semester. This time, I’m going to learn even more than last time. This time, I’m a-gonna do it up right (whatever that would mean). This time I’ll be smarter, sharper, quicker on the draw. My arguments will be crystal clear. This time is the time.

This poem by Joy Harjo is a good one for days when you’re thinking what I’m thinking.

the sharp edges of clear blue windows
motion to me
from the airport's second floor
edges dance in the foothills of the sandias
behind security guards
who wave me into their guncatcher machine

i am a dangerous woman

when the machine buzzes
they say to take off my belt
and i remove it so easy
that it catches the glance
of a man standing nearby
(maybe that is the deadly weapon
that has the machine singing)

i am a dangerous woman
but the weapon is not visible
security will never find it
they can't hear the clicking
of the gun
inside my head

Posted at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In an attempt to dress more professionally, I went shopping for clothes yesterday with a friend. The subject of red dresses came up, and, well, then we’ve come to this, haven’t we?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
doughnuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

— Kim Addonizio

Posted at 10:23 PM | Permalink

— George Garrett

First they were stiff and gaudy,
three painted wooden figures on a table,
bowing in a manger without any walls
among bland clay beasts and shepherds
who huddled where my mother always put them
in a sweet light around the Holy Child.
At that season and by candlelight
it was easy for a child to believe in them.

Later I became one. I brought gold,
ascended a platform in the Parish House
and muffed my lines, but left my gift
beside the cheap doll in its cradle,
knelt in my fancy costume trying to look wise
while the other two (my friends and rivals
for the girl who was chosen to be Mary)
never faltered with frankincense and myrrh.

Now that was a long time ago.
And now I know them for what they were,
moving across vague spaces on their camels,
visionaries, madmen, poor creatures possessed
by some slight deviation of the stars.
I know their gifts were shabby and symbolic.
Their wisdom was a thing of waking dreams.
Their robes were ragged and their breath was bad.

Still, I would dream them back.
Let them be wooden and absurd again
in all the painted glory that a child
could love. Let me be one of them.
Let me step forward once more awkwardly
and stammer and choke on a prepared speech.
Let me bring gold again and kneel
foolish and adoring in the dirty straw.

Posted at 9:39 PM | Permalink

— Marvin Bell

You are not beautiful, exactly.
You are beautiful, inexactly.
You let a weed grow by the mulberry
and a mulberry grow by the house.
So close, in the personal quiet
of a windy night, it brushes the wall
and sweeps away the day till we sleep.

A child said it, and it seemed true:
“Things that are lost are all equal.”
But it isn’t true. If I lost you,
the air wouldn’t move, nor the tree grow.
Someone would pull the weed, my flower.
The quiet wouldn’t be yours. If I lost you,
I’d have to ask the grass to let me sleep.

Posted at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely intitials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable — Yes, Judith, Bon, Henry, Sutpen: all of them. They are there, yet something is missing; they are like a chemical formula exhumed along with the letters from that forgotten chest, carefully, the paper old and faded and falling to pieces, the writing faded, almost indecipherable, yet meaningful, familiar in shape and sense, the name and presence of volatile and sentient forces; you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene, against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing of human affairs.

Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

Posted at 11:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— Robert Penn Warren

The spider has more eyes than I have money.
I used to dream that God was a spider, or

Vice versa, but it is easier
To dream of a funnel, and you
The clear liquid being poured down it, forever.

You do not know what is beyond the little end of the funnel.

The liquid glimmers in darkness, you
Are happy, it pours easily, without fume.

All you have to do is not argue.

Posted at 2:03 PM | Permalink

— William Meredith

Spared by a car — or airplane-crash or
cured of malignancy, people look
around with new eyes at a newly
praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.
For I’ve been brought back again from the
fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie
down for long naps. And I’ve also been
pardoned miraculously for years
by the lava of chance which runs down
the world’s gullies, silting us back.
Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet
happened away.
But it’s not this random
life only, throwing its sensual
astonishments upside down on
the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,
not just me being here again, old
needer, looking for someone to need,
but you, up from the clay yourself,
as luck would have it, and inching
over the same little segment of earth-
ball, in the same little eon, to
meet in a room, alive in our skins,
and the whole galaxy gaping there
and the centuries whining like gnats —
you, to teach me to see it, to see
it with you, and to offer somebody
uncomprehending, impudent thanks.

(via Bakerina)

Posted at 9:40 PM | Permalink

We’ll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one too will be a form of what I dream, a structure of words, and not the flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. I know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest, and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

— Borges, The Other Tiger

Posted at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We’ll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one too will be a form of what I dream, a structure of words, and not the flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. I know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest, and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

— Borges, The Other Tiger

Posted at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I only finally saw The Hours during the ankle recovery. Was transfixed, haunted, must see it again. So it seemed natural to pick up a copy of the book, and I read it this week in three gulps. It is the first book since The English Patient that affected me in this particular way, where it seemed that I was bruising the book by reading it. Perhaps one of these settles into your lap every decade.

Posted at 8:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Fred Chappell

In the white-washed medical-smelling milkhouse
She wrestled clanging steel; grumbled and trembled,
Hoisting the twenty-gallon cans to the ledge
Of the spring-run (six by three, a concrete grave
Of slow water). Before she toppled them in —
Dented armored soldiers booming in pain —
She stopped to rest, brushing a streak of damp
Hair back, white as underbark. She sighed.

“I ain’t strong enough no more to heft these things.
I could now and then wish for a man
Or two � Or maybe not. More trouble, likely,
Than what their rations will get them to do.”

The August six o’clock sunlight struck a wry
Oblong on the north wall. Yellow light entering
This bone-white milkhouse recharged itself white,
Seeped pristine into the dozen strainer cloths
Drying overhead.

                            “Don’t you like men?”

Her hand hid the corner of her childlike grin
Where she’s dropped her upper plate and left a gap.
“Depends on the use you want them for,” she said.
“Some things they’re good at, some they oughtn’t touch.”

“Wasn’t Grandaddy a good carpenter?”

She nodded absentminded. “He was fine.
Built churches, houses, barns in seven counties.
Built the old trout hatchery on Balsam . . .
Here. Give me hand.”

                                   We lifted down
Gently a can and held it till it drowned.
Gushed out of its headless neck a musky clabber
Whitening water like a bedsheet ghost.
I thought, Here spills the soldier’s spirit out;
If I could drink a sip I’d know excitements
He has known; travails, battles, tourneys,
A short life fluttering with pennants.

                                                   She grabbed
A frazzly long-handled brush and scrubbed his innards
Out. Dun flakes of dried milk floated up,
Streamed drainward. In his trachea water sucked
Obscenely, graying like a storm-sky.

“You never told me how you met.”

Continue reading "My Grandmother Washes Her Vessels" »

Posted at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Deadline got pushed back, so still working on the Digital IP paper. Draft due at noon tomorrow. Then grading in the afternoon and Wednesday. Then back to the paper, which must be Finished by 5 p.m. on the 9th.

Until then, more snippets and poetry.

I want a road trip so badly right about now.

notice
— Patti Smith, 1973

These ravings, observations, etc. come from one who, beyond vows, is without mother, gender, or country. who attempts to bleed from the word a system, a space base. no rock island but a body of phrases with all the promise of top soil or a star. a core: a center that will hold, blossom and vein the atmosphere with vascular tissue seams that illuminate and reveal.

longing for ... a ticket, a slit. a peephole. some sign from—. holding to the naive belief that travel will open—. get physically sick like adolescent. no handjob for the word save travel. save one devour manual, route map and dictionaire. save ritual. save rhythm. save cous cous. godhead dialect? foreign tongue kiss? internal voyage: brain rocket. god my skull. yes travel is the key, not, as rimbaud suggested, charity.

Posted at 3:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

(If you’re not familiar with Archy and Mehitabel by Don Marquis, look over here first. It’s very important to understand why the narrator is a reincarnated cockroach.)

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

Continue reading "the lesson of the moth" »

Posted at 3:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

— Charles Bukowski

a good poem is like a cold beer
when you need it,
a good poem is a hot turkey
sandwich when you’re hungry,
a good poem is a gun when
the mob corners you,
a good poem is something that
allows you to walk through the streets of
death,
a good poem can make death melt like
hot butter,
a good poem can frame agony and
hang it on a wall,
a good poem can let your feet touch
China,
a good poem can make a broken mind
fly,
a good poem can let you shake hands
with Mozart,
a good poem can let you shoot craps
with the devil
and win,
a good poem can do almost anything,
and most important
a good poem knows when to
stop.

Posted at 1:17 PM | Permalink

— Charles Bukowski

a storm at last in this damned Los Angeles
desert,
even the lights went out in the neighborhood,
most of the people asleep,
the drunks just pour another drink,
I poured another drink,
1:42 a.m.
the lights go back on,
Brahms begins to play on the radio again,
I think of Turgenev, just for the hell of it,
just because I like his name.
there are good names: Mozart, Celine,
Artaud, Bach.
some names ring through and stick.
anyhow, it’s raining and raining and raining.
and Joe Louis is dead and Ty Cobb is dead
and it’s been a long time since the Waner brothers
patrolled the outfield in Pittsburgh
and whatever happened to Smith Brothers cough
drops?
I used to eat them like candy.
we need the rain.
we need the rain.
we need it.
I used to eat those cough drops like candy and I had
a dot-and-dash set and I knew the Morse code and I
sent out S.O.S.s for years but help never
came.

Continue reading "storm" »

Posted at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

— Patrick Kavanagh

A year ago I fell in love with the functional ward
Of a chest hospital: square cubicles in a row
Plain concrete, wash basins — an art lover’s woe,
Not counting how the fellow in the next bed snored.
But nothing whatever is by love debarred,
The common and banal her heat can know.
The corridor led to a stairway and below
Was the inexhaustible adventure of a gravelled yard.

This is what love does to things: the Rialto Bridge,
The main gate that was bent by a heavy lorry,
The seat at the back of a shed that was a suntrap.
Naming these things is the love-act and its pledge;
For we must record love’s mystery without claptrap,
Snatch out of time the passionate transitory.

Posted at 9:35 AM | Permalink

— Patrick Kavanagh

No, no, no, I know I was not important as I moved
Through the colourful country, I was but a single
Item in the picture, the name, not the beloved.
O tedious man with whom no gods commingle.
Beauty, who has described beauty? Once upon a time
I had a myth that was a lie but it served:
Trees walking across the crest of hills and my rhyme
Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved
Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.
O dance with Kitty Stobling I outrageously
Cried out-of-sense to them, while their timorous paces
Stumbled behind Jove’s page boy paging me.
I had a very pleasant journey, thank you sincerely
For giving me my madness back, or nearly.

Posted at 9:55 AM | Permalink

February and March were poetry months around here, but I can’t be neglecting Actual National Poetry Month. This one is by Jack Butler, an Arkansas poet who wrote a series of food columns for the Arkansas Times that I relished every week for about ten years. He quit awhile back, and the columns were revised and collected as Jack’s Skillet: Plain Talk and Some Recipes, which was not properly filed with the cookbooks when we moved and thus tragically remains packed. This poem can be found there, and also in The Kid Who Wanted to Be a Spaceman and Other Poems. Bakerina’s* archives reminded me of it.

Great love goes mad to be spoken: You went out
to the ranked tentpoles of the butterbean patch,
picked beans in the sun. You bent, and dug
the black ground for fat, purple turnips.
You suffered the cornstalk�s blades, to emerge
triumphant with grain. You spent all day in a coat
of dust, to pluck the difficult word
of a berry, plunk in a can. You brought home
voluminous tribute, cucumbers, peaches,
five-gallon buckets packed tightly with peas,
cords of sugar-cane, and were not content.
You had not yet done the pure, the completed,
the absolute deed. Out of that vegetable ore,
you wrought miracles: snapbeans broke
into speech, peas spilled from the long slit pod
like pearls, and the magical snap of your nail
filled bowls with the fat, white coinage of beans.
Still you were unfinished. Now fog swelled
in the kitchen, your hair wilted like vines.
These days drove you half-wild � you cried,
sometimes, for invisible reasons. In the yard,
out of your way, we played in the leaves, and heard
the pressure-cooker blow out its musical shriek.
Then it was done: You had us stack up the jars
like ingots, or books. In the dark of the shelves,
quarts of squash gave off a glow like late sun.
That was the last we thought of your summer
till the day that even the johnson grass died.
Then, bent over sweet relish and black-eyed peas,
over huckleberry pie, seeing the dog outside
shiver with cold, we would shiver, and eat.

*I have blogrolled Prepare to Meet Your Bakerina for several months now, but have been slow to realize how seriously great her material is. This woman is luring me back into the kitchen, where I haven’t spent much time in for the past few months, and making me gather my courage to bake. As Herself wrote in the archives I’ve been plundering: she doesn’t know it yet, but she’s my friend.

Posted at 9:37 PM | Permalink

I don’t know how I managed to live 29 years and not read Margaret Atwood’s poems. I just ordered Morning in the Burned House as a belated birthday present to myself. And here is a tremendously funny lecture she delivered on the life and work of the poet:

I was once a snub-nosed blonde. My name was Betty. I had a perky personality and was a cheerleader for the college football team. My favourite colour was pink. Then I became a poet. My hair darkened overnight, my nose lengthened, I gave up football for the cello, my real name disappeared and was replaced by one that had a chance of being taken seriously by the literati, and my clothes changed colour in the closet, all by themselves, from pink to black. I stopped humming the songs from Oklahoma and began quoting Kirkegaard. And not only that � all of my high heeled shoes lost their heels, and were magically transformed into sandals. Needless to say, my many boyfriends took one look at this and ran screaming from the scene as if their toenails were on fire. New ones replaced them; they all had beards.

Believe it or not, there is an element of truth in this story. It’s the bit about the name, which was not Betty but something equally non-poetic, and with the same number of letters. It’s also the bit about the boyfriends. But meanwhile, here is the real truth:

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

Posted at 4:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

— W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

(via Fussy, who also posted the painting referred to in the poem and whose archives are endlessly entertaining to me in my current state. I hope that doesn’t make me a FussyStalker.)

Posted at 12:45 PM | Permalink

— Anne Sexton

Be careful of words,
even the miraculous ones.
For the miraculous ones we do our best,
sometimes they swarm like insects
and leave not a sting but a kiss.
They can be good as fingers.
They can be trusty as the rock
you stick your bottom on.
But they can be both daisies and bruises.

Yet I am in love with words.
They are doves falling out of the ceiling.
They are six holy oranges sitting in my lap.
They are the trees, the legs of summer,
and the sun, its passionate face.

Yet often they fail me.
I have so much I want to say,
so many stories, images, proverbs, etc.
But the words aren’t good enough,
the wrong ones kiss me.
Sometimes I fly like an eagle
but with the wings of a wren.

But I try to take care
and be gentle to them.
Words and eggs must be handled with care.
Once broken they are impossible
things to repair.

Posted at 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

— Billy Collins

Every day the body works in the fields on the world
mending a stone wall
or swinging a sickle through the tall grass —
the grass of civics, the grass of money —
and every night the body curls around itself
and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises
from the body in the middle of the night,
leaves the trapezoidal bedroom
with its thick, pictureless walls
to sit by herself at the kitchen table
and heat some milk in a pan.

Continue reading "The Night House" »

Posted at 9:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When asked, I used to say,
“I want to be a doctor,”
Which is the same thing
As a child saying,
“I want to be a priest,”
Or
“I want to be a magician,”
Which is the laying on
Of hands, the vibrations,
The rabbit in the hat
Or the body in the cup,
The curing of the sick
And the raising of the dead.

“Fix and fix, you’re all better,”
I would say
To the neighborhood wounded
As we fought the world war
Through the vacant lots of Ohio.
“Fix and fix, you’re all better,”
And they would rise
To fight again.
But then
I saw my aunt die slowly of cancer
And a man struck down by a car.

All along I had really
Wanted to be a poet,
Which is, you see, almost the same thing as saying,
“I want to be a doctor,”
“I want to be a priest,”
Or
“I want to be a magician.”
All along, without realizing it,
I had wanted to be a poet.

Fix and fix, you’re all better.

- Paul Zimmer

Posted at 12:50 PM | Permalink

Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
the ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus . . .

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there . . .
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands

- LeRoi Jones

Even now, when I’ve so long abandoned literature for rhetoric, it’s poetry that saves me.

Posted at 10:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

It is strange indeed to write of your own past. “In those days” I have written ... but I am not at all sure that those days have been changed by time. All my life I believed in the changes I could, and sometimes did, make in a nature I so often didn‛t like, but now it seems to me that time made alterations and mutations rather than true reforms; and so I am left with so much of the past that I have no right to think it very different from the present.

Lillian Hellman, Pentimento, 26

Posted at 2:32 PM | Permalink

All last week, the Minneapolis news weather people were bemoaning the soaring temperatures (70's and 80's) and the atrocious humidity (45%). Being from the South, I left the windows open most of the time and rejoiced in weather that I found positively springlike. Folks back home reported heat indexes of 109 - 117, and the humidity usually hovers around 80% or more. Lots of hot, hot noons. And then I ran across some Ovid in my packing and well, here you go.

Hot Noon
Ovid's The Loves - V

Hot noon, and I was lying in my bed,
The window halfway open, and the light
The way it is in wood, when sun has fled
After the day, before the coming night,
Or before day, after the night has gone,
For modest girls a reassuring shade,
Just the right sort of light, with curtains drawn,
Wherein to lay inviting ambuscade.

And there Corinna entered, with her gown
Loosened a little, and on either side
Of her white neck the dark hair hanging down.
Semiramis could not have been, as bride,
Any more lovely, nor could Lais move
The hearts of men more easily to love.

Sheer though it was, I pulled the dress away;
Pro forma, she resisted more or less.
It offered little cover, I must say,
And why put up a fight to save a dress?
So soon she stood there naked, and I saw,
Not only saw, but felt perfection there,
Hands moving over beauty without flaw,
The breasts, the thighs, the triangle of hair.

No need for catalogue, to itemize
All those delights, nor could I truly say
That I confined my pleasure to my eyes.
Naked, I took her, naked, till we lay
Worn out, done in. Grant me, O gods, the boon
Of many such another sultry noon!

Posted at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions

back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you

over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

- W.S. Merwin, The Rain in the Trees, 46

Posted at 5:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By Jenny