11.29.16

It's about time I shared something with you from the November edition, because my next one has already arrived. I fear I'll never catch up. There is a lot in here, and since I have no idea how they are chosen or laid out, I would love to assume they are chosen to mesh with each other and be greater than the sum of their parts. I wish I had written down a few thematic ideas when first I read them, because of course now I can't remember anything, except perhaps things happening at night. Picking this one out makes me think rebirth, but that's probably confirmation bias. This is by Bob Hicok, and you can find more of his work online, so please help yourself.

A well-stocked pantry

Related Poem Content Details

My wife went into the pantry for peaches

but came out with a baby — I hadn’t noticed

the house was pregnant, she said — 

it was crying, so I cried back — 

then she cried, the woman I barely know

after sixteen years — why just the other day,

she told me she’d always been afraid

#2 pencils might be made

of what they’re named — but even crying

it was cute — pink and scrunchy-eyed — 

like a newt balloon someone had blown up

until puffy and ready to pop — 

it was as if the universe decided

it was time to act our age — that’s

when we threw all our heroin out — 

took the high-wire down and stopped

skeet shooting in the living room — 

and as much as I miss yelling Pull

while stoned and standing on the edge

of the air, looking into the abyssal fall

I sorta desperately want, someone’s

gotta change the diapers and burp the thing

when it fills with swamp-gas or whatever

that is — the miracle, you know, of birth

is that my wife and I gave up hang gliding

for making the nummy sound against the belly

of the beast who showed up and took over — 

just as once, I shot the rapids, popped out,

squirmed against my mother and destroyed

every other future she might have lived

but one — long before I could speak,

I was cruel — for a few seconds,

I let my mother believe I was everything

she ever wanted — and even now, decades after

my few perfect seconds as a baby, if I called,

at the first unexpected brush of Hey, ma

against her ear, she’d still be hoodwinked

by the tidal pull of my voice

on the ghost of a womb they long ago

ripped out, that she was holding

a full moon in her arms

Dog Head 

Benjamin Goldberg

Our mascot was the bulldog. Bulldogs chased me across playgrounds

until I dreamed them. In class, I finished mazes with a green crayon.

Hedges grew skyward from pages, and I ran. My dad once called

this kind of thing my day-head. When my day-head happened,

they called him at his office. I learned the name Daedalus from an article

I read for science class. It meant a plane with leg-powered wings — 

carbon tubing, plastic skin. A man with a long name flew a longer way

across the sea from Crete. At recess, I reread the same book

of illustrated myths and cryptids. I dreamed of bulldogs with bulls’ heads.

My day-head was a zoo where gods slept. Daedalus sounded like dad,

so I loved him. Class was an enclosure made of cinder block

and twelve weeks without winter. Behind the glass, my day-head paced.

Daedalus was a zookeeper. I dreamed of a god with a bull’s body

and a hood sewn from my face. The article said I weighed the same

as the Daedalus. I traced flight plans and crash sites on my desk.

My teacher asked us to draw self-portraits. The trees were hydras.

On the paper, I drew an outline of my face. I cut my eyes out

with scissors. They called me to the office, and Daedalus was waiting.

I found a bulldog in a magazine and drew a maze inside each iris.

We played tug-of-war in gym. My day-head was a knotted rope

dangling from steel rafters. I pushed my thumb into the sun. I fell once.

I cut the bulldog from the page, then ripped his head in two.

I glued one half over the left side of my face. I left the right side blank.

The article said the Daedalus crashed twenty-one feet from the black sand

of a beach on Santorini. My day-head was a Kevlar fuselage

belly-down in the sea. They called home. I ran home.

On the right side of my face, I drew a sunny day. I signed my name.

11.23.16

Here are some words for the holiday weekend. I hope to be back with some more content in my time off. I like content as a two-faced word; however currently at odds the faces may be.

11-17-16

Thinking in verse

I penciled cross words

as we flew.

Not looking for love,

logic or a life vest;

becoming immune

to the furrowed pelt

of the earth below

and the plumes

of lenticular clouds.

Aloft, I cram

words and complain about rules

and noises breaching

the border of the

engines' feathered crooning.

Make things fit like

we fit, barely: coming out

of our bags and our shoes.

Is this the way we

are supposed to touch the sky?

I ask you.

11.17.16

I've gotten two editions of Poetry magazine, and have been reading and doing a few annotations, but haven't decided which things I want to share. (All is not likely, but its how I lean). I haven't read the commentaries in the back, I'm not sure why I skipped over them, maybe I'll return to them later. Here are two poems for you that are not from the magazine, and don't have anything to do with each other (yet).




Song as Abridged Thesis of George Perkin Marsh's Man and Nature



By Major Jackson

(Poem on the Occasion of the Centenary of the National Park Service)

The pendulous branches of the Norway spruce slowly move
as though approving our gentle walk in Woodstock,
and the oak leaves yellowing this early morning
fall in the parking lot of Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller. 
We hear beneath our feet their susurrus
as the churning of wonder, found, too, in the eyes of a child
who has just sprinted toward a paddock of Jersey cows.
The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Some have never fallen in love with a river of grass
or rested in the dignity of the Great Blue Heron
standing alone, saint-like, in a marshland nor envied
the painted turtle sunning on a log, nor thanked as I have,
the bobcat for modeling how to navigate dynasties of snow,
for he survives in both forests and imaginations
away from the dark hands of developers and myths of profits.
The fate of the land is the fate of man.

Some are called to praise as holy, hillocks, ponds, and brooks,
to renew the sacred contract of live things everywhere,
the cold pensive roamings of clouds above Mount Tom,
to extol silkworm and barn owls, gorges and vales,
the killdeer, egret, tern, and loon; some must rest
at the sandbanks, in deep wilderness, by a lagoon,
estuaries or floodplain, standing in the way of the human storm:
the fate of the land is the fate of man.

Moon for our Daughters

Annie Finch

Moon that is linking our daughters’ Choices, and still more beginnings, Threaded alive with our shadows, These are our bodies’ own voices, Powers of each of our bodies, Threading, unbroken, begetting Flowers from each of our bodies. These are our spiraling borders Carrying on your beginnings, Chaining through shadows to daughters, Moving beyond our beginnings, Moon of our daughters, and mothers.

10.22.16

Weekend words. Yes I complained about this, and yes I still do it, and yes I appreciate you humoring me. 

10-15-16

I was waiting for the winds,

And was disappointed when they didn’t come.

I wanted tonight to be different from every other night,

But it was the same.

More television,

equal rain.

I wanted to pause the film

between the frames,

And pretend, in the dark,

Just for once.

But now I’m surrounded by the detritus,

(treasure and junk)

That defines my days.

My body will desiccate among it,

Hermetically saved.

10-17-16

I don’t write about important things;

Places with foundations, gravity of purpose.

I don’t mention palaces or graveyards

Dripping with history.

I don’t write about weighty things

Which should be lifted or destroyed.

All I write is how the weather is

As I move through the void.

10.18.16

Here are some people who write better than I do; you should go enjoy their words.

The Vespertines

Miller Oberman

1

Do you remember when we were green and supple
I told you stories, my sapling, my brother-sister,
those nights not-sleeping on our bedrolls
made of boiled wool and moss
and I told you of the cloud-maker, ghost
in the cloud-house who made the night-
white wisps and noon-heavy layers,
who drifted in our door—I translated
for you what the cloud-maker said,
the billowing stories that dissolved you,
once, what was the one, do you
remember, that drifted you, laughing,
to sleep?
 

2

We read a book, later, about two
brothers from a far country,
one who died of a cough, the other
soon after in a fire, and both woke, and
both rode to a valley of orange blossoms
and cherry blossoms on a white horse
and found kindness, and found kindness,
and joined the orchard workers’ rebellion
against unjust taxes and were killed
in battle by the landowners’ arrows—
was that, do you remember, the book
singed so we never knew its ending,
or did they wake up again, elsewhere?

Last Lesson from My Grandmother

by Justin Rogers 

there was a time where
you were a pool of energy
a subway
a trolley car from your days in San Francisco
a drug rush that you love to reassure me
was never worth it at the end of the line
you used to tell me
how you traveled nothing but a trainwreck path―
left college to cram a final
hit in abandoned buildings before
dawn reminded you the scariest part
of going high is not the fall, it’s landing
in the same place you took off.

you followed a boy to the Golden Gate Bridge
fell over the edge
landed behind bars
with a drug addiction and no demon to blame but yourself
you tell me walking out of that prison
is what taught you how to walk fast
faster than the odds against you―
never run, you say―
running is admitting you
are already defeated
that there is nothing in your future
to stop and smell except skin drenched kerosene
a noose
a razor
the rust of the Golden Gate bridge
where you plant your feet

Bingo

by Chelsea Weber-Smith

At the muckleshoot casino my girlfriend and I are playing bingo
at their half-price, Thursday evening session.
At the other end of our long table there is a woman in her forties,
sitting alone with a glass of white wine in front of her
on a square napkin, with her orange dauber held in her hand like a pencil.
She looks like she is writing something more important than I am now,
on a piece of paper with numbers on it, marking a code
that people smarter than me will arrange and understand, without brains
that stop suddenly and pointlessly, like squirrels in the middle
of a busy road. Women behind her smoke and loudly announce
that they are approaching bingo or that they have never played bingo before
or that they don't understand the new bingo shape. On the huge TVs
hanging around the room we see the hand of the caller, only a part of her hand,
so close that we can see the wrinkles of her knuckles like pebbles dropped
into water. Her nails are painted a reddish purple, and I imagine
that she has a manicure every week. She is a celebrity here,
turning the ball toward the camera gently, and then calling
the letter and number with a practiced and elegant lilt.
N thirty-five. Can you say that three hundred people wait
breathlessly, apprehensively, for your every single word? I can't. And though I dream
it once in awhile, three hundred people, three thousand people,
listening to me read some poem or sing, or talk like a manic priest
about how Jesus was just a man brave enough to
announce his own holiness, I'm not sure I've got what it takes
to get there, or if I even want to. But at the muckleshoot
those hands hang above us, gently move unknowns into view.
When someone yells Bingo! there is a collective groan first,
because we're in this damn cold world together
and then after the win is verified, sometimes a small applause.

10.13.16

I was going to post last Wednesday about it being national poetry day, but now that there is a national day of every damn thing, it seems to have lost its appeal. The one day a year knit bloggers and mommy bloggers et al pay homage by posting a "deep" poem they learned in high school. Sorry, I'm salty today. Deal with it.

I don't feel particularly like a writer anymore, and no real call to keep writing about writing, since that seems like an order of magnitude more writing than I am doing anymore. I'm not writing and not blogging and I find it hard to care about either, except when people decide that Bob Dylan gets the Nobel Prize for literature. Apparently that gets me fighting mad.

Don't get me wrong, I love the guy's music and think he's made a hell of a contribution to our culture. But song lyrics aren't poetry, which is the most apt comparison to literature that could be made. A lot of arguments I'm hearing saying that they are the same or might as well be the same really disappoint me. Poetry really has no modern qualifications in terms of a definition. The former, "sound and sense" type gateposts are mostly considered prescriptive now, and you can write basically anything sonically, structurally, etc and have it be a poem. Songs still have the strong qualification that, to be successful, they have to sound good. This means there is a much stronger metric and rhythmic component that is needed. Also, there is nearly always a medium-to-strong presence of rhyme. These things make sense, they sound good to the human ear. Note, I said to be successful. I am sure there are plenty of really cruddy songs that are more closely related to the do-anything structures of poetry. For instance, many songs from the "emo" trend tended to have long, drawn-out lines that had difficult meters without necessarily any parallelism to other lines, and rhymes that were not as pleasant to the ear. (Of course I can't think of any examples, I wasn't a huge fan of the genre for a reason, so not a ton of it has stuck in my head).

Another thing I hear here is "what about poetry set to music?" which is a dumb question, because in asking if you've defined it as poetry set to music which is clearly defining two different things. This is not to say that there are not awesome performance poets who use various sonic and vocal elements for their performances, which are many and diverse, but which are not songs. The article I referenced above basically confirms "Mr. Dylan’s songs do get more mileage, and more shades of meaning, with every inflection he brings to them onstage on his never-ending tour. He can sharpen their barbs, tease out their mixed emotions and infuse them with passion or irony, constantly rescuing them from their own familiarity — constantly recharging his reputation, as if he hadn’t already earned it all".  Something better when sung? Must be a song. 

Another main criticism I have of that article and many of them out there championing this decision is that their argument seems to be that his work is good and does all the things good music should...therefore it is literature somehow. 

But there’s no question that Mr. Dylan has created a great American songbook of his own: an e pluribus unum of high-flown and down-home, narrative and imagistic, erudite and earthy, romantic and cutting, devout and iconoclastic, finger-pointing and oracular, personal and universal, compassionate and pitiless. His example has taught writers of all sorts — not merely poets and novelists — about strategies of both pinpoint clarity and anyone’s-guess free association, of telegraphic brevity and ambiguous, kaleidoscopic moods.

This is a great blurb, and his music does all these things, and they make it great. But they do not make it literature. This description could inform criticism about any art form, from the novella to surface design; that which is a combination of the best of its genre, tattles on the establishment, and inspires others to create and to create well.


Here's another blurb I have a few problems with:

As much as any academically beloved poet — say, Ezra Pound or T. S. Eliot — Mr. Dylan has always placed himself on a literary continuum where allusions focus and amplify meaning. But half a century ago, when guardians of culture were diligently policing boundaries between the purportedly high and low, Mr. Dylan drew his allusions not only from Western literature but also from the blues and the news, gleefully knocking their heads together; in “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” he put Shakespeare in the alley.

It posits that Dylan himself put his work alongside that of poets to be judged as poets are, but I think that is quite a stretch. It also suggests that folk music doesn't or can't use allusion or other literary techniques without being considered on the same plane. I'm not going to go search and post lyrics, but anyone who appreciates music, folk and otherwise, can give you examples of the use of such techniques that usually are considered "high" on the continuum like chiasmus, parallelism, assonance, historical and cultural references, etc. The point is, that good music does this. Not just good literature. Doing something like this doesn't make it necessarily literary, but does make it excellent.

I have talked about this before, and it is interesting to think that music is ubiquitous in our culture, but poetry is basically hidden. You hear music in your car, from all of your devices, on tv and in movies, in stores, being played in public, etc. When does anyone in our culture consume poetry? Rarely, and usually in private or in small gatherings would be my guess. So its disappointing to me that a musician, who has world-renown would jump the ladder over other writers who maybe are as deserving, but not as well-known (or just as well-known, who knows). I know many novelists are somewhat famous, but can they reach the stature of a rock icon? And the wealth, for that matter?

What troubles me about his being awarded a literary prize is, why would it not go to a poet? There are scads of interesting, unique, socially-forward, gleam-in-your-eye poets of all stripes just in the USA right now, and I'm sure all over the world. I'm a little sad that they were passed over this time for someone who deserves accolades, but hardly publicity.

All this could be solved by making a Nobel Prize for music and calling it good. Tl;dr version: Bob Dylan is deserving of many awards, just not this one.

8.30.16

I haven't written in forever, and last night it occurs to me that the feeling of not doing so is similar to that which I used to feel when I hadn't gone to church in a while (back when I went to church semi-regularly). There are some things I miss about going to church, but I no longer feel this way. However, when I do write after a long absence (journal or poem are pretty much the only things I do anymore. Short fiction, you win. I'll never get there) it feels much like that first time back in a service. The surrounds are lovely, you feel at peace, perhaps transcendent, full of purpose even. (Maybe even part of a community, if you write or share in the company of others).


After all of that, I'm not even going to share it with you. Mean lady. Here are some pretty things that came to me:



The Dream 


Lola Ridge



I have a dream
to fill the golden sheath
of a remembered day . . . .
(Air
heavy and massed and blue
as the vapor of opium . . .
domes
fired in sulphurous mist . . .
sea
quiescent as a gray seal . . .
and the emerging sun
spurting up gold
over Sydney, smoke-pale, rising out of the bay . . . . )
But the day is an up-turned cup
and its sun a junk of red iron
guttering in sluggish-green water
where shall I pour my dream?




Senior Discount


Ali Liebgott

I want to grow old with you.
Old, old.

So old we pad through the supermarket
using the shopping cart as a cane that steadies us.

I’ll wait at register two in my green sweater
with threadbare elbows, smiling
because you’ve forgotten the bag of day-old pastries.

The cashier will tell me a joke about barbers as I wait.
He repeats the first line three times
but the only word I understand is barber.

Over the years we’ve caught inklings
of our shrinking frames and hunched spines.

You’re a little confused
looking for me at the wrong register with a bag
of almost-stale croissants clenched in your hand.

The first time I held your hand it felt enormous in my own.
Sasquatch, I teased you, a million years ago.

Over here, I yell, but not in a mad way.

We’re laughing.
You have a bright yellow pin on your coat that says, Shalom!

Senior Discount, you say.
But the cashier already knows us.
We’re everyone’s favorite customers.

8.4.16

Have you ever participated in a community poetry event or project? Lately I have been noticing ads for the Seattle Poetry on Buses campaign. This year's theme is Your Body of Water. I thought I'd try to submit something if I had something that fit. Otherwise, writing on a theme makes me feel like I'm trying too hard, or something, perhaps shades of being back in school. (Also, they have to be 50 words or less. Do you thrive under restriction? I guess a Twitter poet would be well-suited to this limit).

Here's last years' collection, under the theme Writing Home.


That's all I have to say for today.

7.30.16

Weekend words for you. I wrote this at a winery, and after taking a photo of my original, left it there. Not really poetry terrorism, since I wasn't forcing anyone to consume it, but still a brave act for me. Who knows, they probably recycled it.




7.23.16

Divested of dreaming

I wake in an air of omens.

Tired of carrying, I pour wine out

with my poems.

We forget to lock eyes and admit

we share the same burdens.

My comings and goings don’t match

the depth of my urging;

Coated with words that are liquid

in what they furnish.

Waking each day I hope for a hope

that can grow,

Stained cups on the counter are

all my work shows.

7.29.16

I feel like a real blogger--I got Russian spam! At first I wasn't writing (here or there, or anywhere, Sam-I-Am) because of all the violence and terrible news, which just keeps spooling on and on. So the grief made a few things, and then I just got numb to it and stopped at all. Then I got hurt (sports injury) and started feeling particularly useless and unhelpful, which never gets anywhere.

I liked these poems by Catie Rosemurgy, at first because I related to the sometimes-consuming quality of my dreams. They eat up a huge amount of head-space throughout the day, depending on what happens. When I was still semi-serious about self-publishing, I had a whole segment in my manuscript about things written from dreams. They are so real that often I forget which mundane action I did in real life and which I didn't. Another thing I came to like about them is the death of self. The more I spend thinking about the self and purpose, the less I am sure any of them are really alive, so I like to see how her speakers kill themselves or die off, time after time.




America Talks to me Like a Mother

Don’t worry. One kills in dreams
but wakes having not killed.

Having not killed is part of waking. Some mornings, though,
you lay there pinned under layers of light, fear,

and woolen blankets.
You know what’s right and what’s wrong,
what you don’t know is what happened
and if you were actually there.

That’s why dreams of digging a deep hole with a stolen shovel
are so confusing. That’s why you expect to jerk awake
when you stand in a pile of dry brush
holding a lit match in your hand.

The best thing to do, always,
is get up and walk down the stairs.
Don’t leave.
Not yet.

Wait awhile in the kitchen, it doesn’t matter whose kitchen,
and let the house absorb the blame.
That’s what a house is for.

You aren’t screaming,
you’re insisting
because you’re always wrong,
even while you sit on the ground before daybreak waiting
for enough light to gather sticks.
You don’t know yet what a stick is.
You can’t be expected to remember anything
once you’ve seen the sun rise.

All day long, you walk back and forth through the field,
standing guard over what didn’t happen
to keep it from mixing with what did.
You didn’t shoot the gun, you just listened well
when people talked about how to do it.
You didn’t walk unscathed through the fire,
you walked unscathed over it.
You happened to find a narrow bridge.

You wouldn’t purposely hurt anyone,
but keep describing all the ways that you would.
List all the things that never happened,
and see if you can suck clean the edges of what did.

Winter in Gold River

Pretty girl. The weather has knocked her down again

and given her to the lake to wear as a skin.


Why am I always being the weather?
There were days in the winter
when her smile was so lovely I felt
the breathing of my own goodness,

though it remained fetal and separate.
I was a scavenger who survives


with a sling and stones, but whose god
nonetheless invents the first small bright bird.
And it was like flight to bring food to her lips


with a skeletal hand. But now she will always
be naked and sad. She will be what happens


to lake water that is loved and is also
shallow enough. The thickening, the slowing,
the black blood of it, the chest opened
to reveal the inevitable heart attack.


God, the silence of the chamber
we watch from. What happens to water
that isn’t loved? It undergoes processes.


It freezes beside traffic.
But the reaching out to all sides at once,
the wet closing of what was open?
That is a beautiful woman.


So of course I stand and stare, never able
to pinpoint the exact moment I killed her.

On the same themes, but too long to reproduce, is her poem Miss Peach: The College Years which you should please also read.