1.26.16

I hope everyone who lives on the East coast weathered the Snowzilla or Jonas or whatever they're calling the massive precipitation they received. I love snow and must admit to deep envy, although I've heard salting isn't all that great, and that cabin fever is a real problem.

I also must admit to some slacking on the creative front, I hope that will return to normalcy soon. Here are some offerings for you. Do you have any for me? I need some inspiration.




Mud Season


Tess Taylor

We unstave the winter’s tangle.
Sad tomatoes, sullen sky.

We unplay the summer’s blight.
Rotted on the vine, black fruit

swings free of strings that bound it.
In the compost, ghost melon; in the fields

grotesque extruded peppers.
We prod half-thawed mucky things. 

In the sky, starlings eddying.
Tomorrow, snow again, old silence.

Today, the creaking icy puller.
Last night I woke

to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof—a foreign liquid tongue.

First Snow

Arthur Sze

A rabbit has stopped on the gravel driveway:

                            imbibing the silence,
                            you stare at spruce needles:

                                                        there’s no sound of a leaf blower,
                                                        no sign of a black bear;

                a few weeks ago, a buck scraped his rack
                            against an aspen trunk;
                            a carpenter scribed a plank along a curved stone wall.

                                         You only spot the rabbit’s ears and tail:

                when it moves, you locate it against speckled gravel,
                but when it stops, it blends in again;

                            the world of being is like this gravel:

                                         you think you own a car, a house,
                                         this blue-zigzagged shirt, but you just borrow      

                                               these things.

                Yesterday, you constructed an aqueduct of dreams
                                           and stood at Gibraltar,

                                                                      but you possess nothing.

                Snow melts into a pool of clear water;
                              and, in this stillness,

                                            starlight behind daylight wherever you gaze.

Do you have favorite pieces for this time of year? One of my favorite short stories is Winter Dreams by F Scott Fitzgerald, although it does treat other times of the year as well. Winter has always been a favorite (tied with fall), possibly biased because my birthday falls in winter. This season is a great time for reading, contemplation, creativity, and other things that come from staying inside more than normal. Enjoy!

1.17.16

Yes, I have been on vacation. It was great! Now I'm back, ready to share some weekend words with you. Hilariously, I grabbed some old notebooks from my mom's house when I was last over there. Hilariously because they were from high school and before, and what might be called poetry was inside, and it was terrible and laughable. As were my attempts at art, before I realized that I am not an artist. The following poems are not of that ilk, I wouldn't do that to you.

1-13-16

I wanted to stand in the surf

and be crushed by a wave.

Rolled with flechettes of stone

made cold, and made into the mist,

and be made into the bones of this place.

At the steps of a temple

I wished I could feel more.

Even with the heavy clouds

peering over my shoulder;

even with the weight of time

and sharp edges of beauty

I am still a dull ump.

Too heavy to float but too light to sink,

scuffed, but uncarveable.

This one was made on the same date, so I don't know what else to call it.

Standing in sunlight’s kitchen door

facing out,

I know behind me in the white slats of light

is a smile and a promise.

In every day, in every life

I have another track to follow,

hopefully with bends to the hills,

and to the sea,

and hopefully again to the bright morning

we can spend.

1.7.16

The following poems are by Monica Ferell. A nice quotation from poetryfoundation.org encapsulates the style: "Her allusive poems often seem to molt, revealing vulnerable, raw skin caught mid-transformation. In a 2008 interview for Sarabande Press, Ferrell discussed the role of uncertainty in her work, stating, “I’m trying to let something that wants to come into being do so—poetry as uncovering, rather than invention or rhetoric, and a form of devotion and service.' " Lets see some of what's inside. 


Emma Bovary



I would have liked then for someone to touch me
So I could know the purpose of this hardship.
Black-eyed and impassive as a canyon,
From the hive of my mind, I looked at their faces 
As I moved between rows of espaliered pears.
I only intended for someone to show
Me, once, an affection like the sun
Shows even the simplest bulb, entering what’s hidden.
Let me show them instead the picture
In a knife’s reflection, take down my hair
Where the gravedigger kneels among new potatoes.
Behind my teeth are headstones, and behind those
Skeletons of cavemen, of dinosaurs,
And under my skin: alphabets, alphabets
In black ink, a legacy of histories tiny and alive
As an ant army marching toward forever.
Understand, please—I, too, have a splendid use,
This world could not get rid of me if it wanted to.




Geburt des Monicakinds

I woke. A tiny knot of skin on a silver table

Set in the birth-theater, blinking in the glare

Of electric lights and a strange arranged

 

Passel of faces: huge as gods in their council.

I was the actor who forgets his lines and enters

On stage suddenly wanting to say, I am.

 

I was almost all eye: they weighed me down,

Two lump-big brown-sugar bags in a face

Which did not yet know struggle, burden;

 

How the look of newborns unnerves. Then

They wrapped me in pale yellow like a new sun

Still too small to throw up into the sky.

 

 

              It was midnight when they injected me

With a plague; tamed, faded as imperialism, pox

Had once put its palm-leaf hand over a quarter of Earth

 

Saying, these. Now it was contracted to a drop:

And in the morning I knew both death and life.

Lapped in my nimbus of old gold light, my

 

Huge lashes drooped over my deepened eyes, like

Ostrich-feather shades over twin crown princes: wet heads

Sleek and doomed as the black soul of an open poppy.

This last one is especially transformative. I enjoyed as I read how my perspective seemed to shift between that of a new baby and that of the new mother.

1.4.16

The other day I was on Capital Hill to go to the art store there, and stopped into Elliot Bay Book company. I love that store, and their old location was a pretty magical part of my childhood. I always end up in the poetry section, and it smells so great there, with all the paper, that I just want to take all of the lovely friends-I-haven't-met-yet home. So naturally I have a poet who's chapbook I browsed to share with you. From poetry foundation dot org:

Rebecca Hoogs is the author of a chapbook, Grenade (2005) and her poems have appeared in Poetry, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Zyzzyva, The Journal, Poetry Northwest, The Florida Review, and others. She is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (2004) and Artist Trust of Washington State (2005). She is the Director of Education Programs and the curator and host for the Poetry Series for Seattle Arts & Lectures.

So, local, which is great, and approachable, (here is her blog, only one post) and twitter. Tech, man.




Another Plot Cliche

My dear, you are the high-speed car chase, and I,   

I am the sheet of glass being carefully carried   

across the street by two employees of Acme Moving   

who have not parked on the right side   

because the plot demands that they make   

the perilous journey across traffic,   

and so they are cursing as rehearsed   

as they angle me into the street, acting as if   

they intend to get me to the department store, as if   

I will ever take my place as the display window, ever clear   

the way for a special exhibit at Christmas, or be Windexed   

once a day, or even late at night, be pressed against   

by a couple who can’t make it back to his place,   

and so they angle me into the street, a bright lure,   

a provocative claim, their teaser, and indeed   

you can’t resist my arguments, fatally flawed   

though they are, so you come careening to but and butt   

and rebut, you come careening, you being   

both cars, both chaser and chased, both good and bad, both   

done up with bullets that haven’t yet done you in.   

I know I’m done for: there’s only one street   

on this set and you’ve got a stubborn streak a mile long.   

I can smell the smoke already.   

                                                No matter, I’d rather shatter   

than be looked through all day. So come careening; I know   

you’ve other clichés to hammer home: women with groceries   

to send spilling, canals to leap as the bridge is rising.   

And me? I’m so through. I’ve got a thousand places to be.



I so want this last line to be "thousand pieces to be", and I think that's not a coincidence! This is from her chapbook Self-Storage, which is the one I browsed at the book store. There's a lovely review of it here. The reviewer, John Wesley Horton, looks at this following poem specifically, and I really liked his take on it.



Come Here


When, in a sprawling subterranean housewares shop 
of Rome, I asked the price of some wine glasses, 
and the salesman told me and then told me 
to veni qui, to come here, I went. 
He showed me some other glasses. 
Do you like these? he asked. I don't speak 
much Italian so said only, yes, I like, 
crystale, he said, and pinged the glass 
with a fingernail. Yes, I repeated, crystale. 
And then he touched my arm and said veni qui, 
veni qui, and so we went to another part 
of the breakable underworld where real 
about-to-be-married Italians were filling 
their bridal registry and so like me did not yet 
have all their words for negativity 
and he stopped before another set of glasses 
and said, you like? And again, yes, I liked. 
And again he rang the tiny bell of what he was 
trying to sell me. And then, arm touch, come here, 
and then yes, I like. This went on for some time 
until I'd liked it all. I liked and was like every glass 
he held. All I was was touched. All I could say was yes 
to everything but I bought just two small glasses 
from which you and I have yet to drink.



Oof, my heart. 

1.1.16

In an effort to avoid what I was complaining about yesterday, here is a semi-weekend-words post for you (semi given that it is still Friday, but I am off work). I couldn't find the poem that I wanted via the highly scientific ctrl + f method, but here are some that are in the same vein. Enjoy!

6/21/10

I rise from what stagnant strangeness

To the surface.

The sky was lacewing-blurred

Till the cold cleared my eyes.

A gasp of understanding,

And then a stab of pain, emerges

From the jagged breaths

That are crystalline with ice.

This one is so old it doesn't have a date as a title, I can't even remember when I started doing that. I think this one may be from 06 or 07, I know it was a school vacation when I was in college. I went back 3 dump-documents on the cloud (they're not anthologies because I shove every darn thing into them) to find something good! Check out how different it is.

The stark skeletons of trees against the sky

Now bare and reaching in the wind

The air is crisp and cold and full of clouds

High and perfect and pure

And bright and barren.

Pine arms like compass points to the horizon

Proud and sharply scented like the air

My presence on the great curve of the earth

And of the latitudes drawn over like a map

I have never been more beautifully aware.

No fair-weather friend, the frost enthralls

Wind-chill keeps the mercury busy

The gulls on the waterfront match the clouds

With the cold cries

Of my northern city.

I am not a poet populist. Not in the news

Of voice and risk and symbolic legislation

Not even a poet, really,

Just a winter Washingtonian

Who looks out on the season with joy-

And tempered patience.

And another random, from Berkeley, this was an assignment (or at least peripheral to something I was doing in a poetry class at the time, on the Modernists, the reader will see their imprint here). Oh, I thought I was awfully clever (this makes me laugh, now).

I blow my nose and leaves fall from the trees,

Wondering what will follow when I sneeze.

*

The moments that dripped from narcissus last

This season can be seen in salted frost.

*

I crouch and watch the faces that debate

From north and west in the hanging handkerchiefs.

*

Fog plays house as a petaled cloud,

Admires herself all the length of Williams street.

*

At the empty bus stop I shuffle pebbles on the ground

And sketch the passer’s portraits for a pound.

This sort of derailed into "lets read old things and laugh at how silly they are". If you like it, I'll do it again. I have thousands of poems, most of questionable quality. It feels weird to say that!