9.5.14

Big things are afoot this weekend. Here's something for your Weekend Words:

1/25/13

I like the way you fit me

like the worn square on the pocket of my jeans,

like the pen in the smooth groove of my finger.

We are scuffed in all the right places

and together we know all the words.

The thoughtless motions, gears of habit

(I always have things just the way I mean)

adjusted me to such a frequency,

and before I knew it was different,

I was pleased.

The coins go in the jar, and the phone

must be with the chapstick on the night stand

before I can sleep.

We lay out our days in each other’s hands.

9.4.14

Something simple to go against the wildness out there today. From Gwendolyn Brooks:

my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell

I hold my honey and I store my bread   

In little jars and cabinets of my will.   

I label clearly, and each latch and lid   

I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.   

I am very hungry. I am incomplete.

And none can tell when I may dine again.   

No man can give me any word but Wait,   

The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;   

Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt   

Drag out to their last dregs and I resume   

On such legs as are left me, in such heart   

As I can manage, remember to go home,

My taste will not have turned insensitive   

To honey and bread old purity could love.

9.2.14

I never finished this yesterday. Truthfully, I barely started it. I wanted to share something for Labor day, particularly part of the tradition of labor poetry. I even had a poet in mind, Philip Levine, the former Poet Laureate of the US, who has a good body of work about Work. (He writes in many other themes, including beautifully transcendent nature poetry, but this theme does stand out among his poems).

In a short essay of his titled Overhand the Hammers Swing: the Poems of Work, Levine differentiates between those who see work being done, and those who do it. The main differences being, the first group tends to see work as beautiful and as an element of community, and the second sees it as a destructive necessity.

Sarah Ehlers writes in a review of the book Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys by John Marsh, that the borth of the labor movement and the birth of modern American poetry coincided. A snippet:

In Marsh’s narrative, during the early part of the twentieth century, writing about workers and the poor provided a means for U.S. poets to buck 19th-century genteel verse traditions. Those traditions emphasized poetry’s role as a wellspring of beauty and held that the art transcended, rather than reflected, the clamors of modern life. Poems portraying the gritty realities of modernity were antithetical to poems written by genteel versifiers.

I can see why labor poetry would be a strong tradition in the US. There is a ton on this topic, and I feel like I'd need to break it up to do it justice. I'm going to stick with a Levine for now and we'll see where it takes us.


What work is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,just because you don't know what work is.  


I enjoy the contrast between the speaker and the brother. Even though the brother works, it is done as a means to an end for his art, whereas the speaker doesn't seem to have any aim other than to find work. I find this poem terrifically sad, partly due to the bleakness of the visual elements and pace, and partly due to the speaker's desperation. The pace of Levine's poems are something I really enjoy, because they move forward calmly, despite the turmoil of the content. (I wish I had this skill)

One more for good measure:


Detroit Grease Shop Poem

Four bright steel crosses,
universal joints, plucked
out of the burlap sack --
"the heart of the drive train,"
the book says. Stars
on Lemon's wooden palm,
stars that must be capped,
rolled, and anointed,
that have their orders
and their commands as he
has his.

Under the blue
hesitant light another day
at Automotive
in the city of dreams.
We're all here to count
and be counted, Lemon,
Rosie, Eugene, Luis,
and me, too young to know
this is for keeps, pinning
on my apron, rolling up
my sleeves.

The roof leaks
from yesterday's rain,
the waters gather above us
waiting for one mistake.
When a drop falls on Lemon's
corded arm, he looks at it
as though it were something
rare or mysterious
like a drop of water or
a single lucid meteor
fallen slowly from
nowhere and burning on
his skin like a tear.

8.29.14

Early weekend words. I don't know if I'm going to have any time to do posting this weekend, so have an early edition.

6/25/14

Take a moment to ask the creator

what it’s like to be unmade.

No marble image, impressed with sack cloth

survives two thousand years unchanged.

Forget your identity,

or it will be forgotten for you.

Poles shift, connections blur,

deductive scrambling leaves a logic layer.

Trade destruction for attrition,

some say the world will end in water.

I throw up my hands in resignation--

or, one throws her hands up,

not sure who’s shoes she stands in.

8.27.14

I know I've been on a jazz kick, and I'm going to move away from that, but the learning process keeps uncovering more and more that I want to share.

In my browsing, I came across work by Bob Kaufman, a beat poet with an incredible past. This blog post by fellow poet Cedar Sigo says it better than I could, but I will include some excerpts:

It seems that the actual facts and dates of Kaufman’s life have been swallowed whole by prevailing myth. He was a merchant seaman, sailed around the world, gave endless monologues in North Beach, was harassed and often beaten by police, moved to New York, received shock therapy, narrowly missed a lobotomy, and took a 12-year vow of silence in 1963 following a dark vision after JFK’s assassination. He broke his silence in 1973 after the end of the Vietnam War and wrote a fascinating return sequence of poems now collected in The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978 (1981), which is edited and with an introduction by Foye. His work could not be contained by the page. Foye writes, “So absolute was Kaufman’s dedication to the oral and automatic sources of poetry, it was only at the insistence of his wife, Eileen, that he began to write down his work.”

He is credited with coining the term "beatnik" as well, according to Raymond Foye. From Wikipedia, Ken Kesey shares a memory of Kaufman:

 I can remember driving down to North Beach with my folks and seeing Bob Kaufman out there on the street. I didn’t know he was Bob Kaufman at the time. He had little pieces of Band-Aid tape all over his face, about two inches wide, and little smaller ones like two inches long -- and all of them made into crosses. He came up to the cars, and he was babbling poetry into these cars. He came up to the car I was riding in, and my folks, and started jabbering this stuff into the car. I knew that this was exceptional use of the human voice and the human mind.

This exposure to poetry, when you are least expecting it, is both intimate and intimidating. A class of mine once participated in a similar "Poetry Terrorism" experiment (not particularly successfully), which attempted to force those around you to become your audience in some attention-grabbing way. We think so much of poetry as being something that you come to, pull up a chair to, and engage with on your own terms and in your own way. Having it thrust in your face turns it into something else entirely. I have always wanted to try this again, but let's face it: I'm terrible at extemporaneous anything, and this sounds as terrifying for the speaker as it does for the audience. Let's have some poems, I've picked Heavy Water Blues and I Have Folded my Sorrows because they are so different.

heavy water blues 1967

The radio is teaching my goldfish Jujitsu
I am in love with a skindiver who sleeps underwater
My neighbors are drunken linguists, & I speak butterfly
Consolidated Edison is threatening to cut off my brain
The postman keeps putting sex in my mailbox,
My mirror died, and I can’t tell if it still reflects,
I put my eyes on a diet, my tears are gaining too much weight.

I crossed he dessert in a taxicab
only to be locked in a pyramid
With the face of a dog
on my breath

I went to a masquerade
Disguised as myself
Not one of my friends
Recognized

I dreamed I went to John Mitchell’s poetry party
in my maidenform brain

Put the silver in the barbeque pit
The Chinese are attacking with nuclear
Restaurants

My radio is teaching my goldfish Jujitsu
My old lady has taken up skindiving and sleeps underwater
I am hanging out with a drunken linguist, who can speak butterfly
and represent the caterpillar industry down in Washington D.C.

I never understand other people’s desires or hopes,
Until they coincide with my own
then we clash

I have definite proof that the culture of the caveman,
Disappeared due to his inability to produce one magazine
That could be delivered by a kid on a bicycle

When reading all those thick books on the life of god,
It should be noted that they were all written by men.

It is perfectly fine to cast the first stone,
if you have some more in your pocket.

Television, America’s ultimate relief, from the Indian disturbance.

I hope that when machines finally take over,
They don't build men that break down,
as soon as they’re paid for.

I shall refuse to go to the moon, 

Unless I'm inoculated against

the dangers of indiscriminate love.

After riding across the desert in a taxicab,
he discovered himself locked in a pyramid
With the face of a dog on his breath.

The search for the end of the circle,
Constant occupation of squares.

Why don’t they stop throwing symbols,
The air is cluttered enough with echoes.

Just when I cleaned the manger for the wisemen,
The shrews from across the street showed up.

The voice of the radio shouted, get up 

do something to someone
but me and my son 

laughed in our furnished room.

This trips me out, and not just because its filled with abstract images, surreal juxtapositions, and appears to represent the 60's so well. It's surprising because, between the wild lines that don't seem to follow (or use complete sentences) are these terse little aphorisms that balloon through the carnival. The repetition of a few of the phrases comes as a surprise too, since one might expect that they are apropos of nothing, until they repeat. I have a feeling a piece like this will offer me something different each time I approach it. Here's the other:

I Have Folded My Sorrows

I have folded my sorrows into the mantle of summer night,
Assigning each brief storm its allotted space in time,
Quietly pursuing catastrophic histories buried in my eyes.
And yes, the world is not some unplayed Cosmic Game,
And the sun is still ninety-three million miles from me,
And in the imaginary forest, the shingles hippo becomes the gay unicorn.
No, my traffic is not addled keepers of yesterday's disasters,
Seekers of manifest disembowelment on shafts of yesterday's pains.
Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.
And yes, I have searched the rooms of the moon on cold summer nights.
And yes, I have refought those unfinished encounters. Still, they remain unfinished.
And yes, I have at times wished myself something different.

The tragedies are sung nightly at the funerals of the poet;
The revisited soul is wrapped in the aura of familiarity.

This poem seems to have every difference from Heavy Water Blues, but I think they are different expressions of similar things. This appears to be sonnet, with some metric consistency, even with a little consonance for resolution. The phrases are mostly complete sentences, and the images are made with typical comparisons rather than surreal images mounted on one another. I feel like a lot of the surreal is still there, though, not just in the fabulous hippo-to-unicorn conversion, but also in the universe as it exists around the speaker. I am really intrigued by the small sample of his work I have looked at thus far. 

8.26.14

A little connection to the topic of jazz and poetry from the other day: I found an excellent article discussing this and linking the two literal concepts, and how they work together. As usual, you should read it all since I can't quote it all, but here are some bits I particularly liked:

A successful example of such an interaction occurred in Canberra in August this year where the Chicago-born performance poet, Miles Merrill, collaborated with the Gai Bryant Quartet in a concert held at the Street Theatre. Merrill is one of the country’s most accomplished performance poets and Gai Bryant is a strong saxophone player in the bop and post-bop tradition. The music was, for the most part, closely arranged to suit the poetry performance and convincingly reinforced the various moods established by the poet. Once, a more ad-lib approach was used and this too (though inherently risky) worked well. The whole event was reminiscent of Charles Mingus’ 1957 album The Clown, which featured improvising spoken word artist, Jean Shepherd. It’s worth noting here too that Bryant’s group also played several pieces without the poet — implying perhaps that such collaborations have their natural limits.

(...)

In the work I (and sometimes fellow poet, Lynn Hard) have done so far with musicians including (...), I have tended to strike a different balance. In a performance Lynn and I gave with the Luke Sweeting Trio (piano, bass, drums) at The Loft in Canberra in June this year we viewed the music as a support and an intensifier to the poetry rather than the poetry’s being an addendum (or introduction) to the music. Several of Lynn’s poems were written as responses to well-known jazz standards such as ‘Whisper Not’ and ‘Milestones’ and began with a complete chorus of the tune played first by the trio, followed by the poem which was timed to take up one or two choruses. On this occasion all of our poems were about jazz in one way or another – though I have performed with jazz musicians (eg. Eric Ajaye on bass) some of my poems on other themes with, I hope, equal effectiveness. 

The author (Geoff Page) has added tracks so that you can hear the performances and how they work together. I listened to one and thought it was fairly successful, although the poet spoke over the background music, and that seemed to confine him (or at least, strongly encourage him) to speak in a cadence I don't know if the work would have otherwise required/suggested. The other audio clip was of the poem Parable in 4/4 by Geoff Page as well, with the text accompanying it. The sound bite for this poem was, I felt, much more successful for showcasing the poem, since the music was less distracting, but I imagine a musician may disagree with me. (It was also gratifying to hear the audience's reaction in the second clip).

This article comes from the Australian poetry review Cordite: "Published four to six times a year (and with various special issues in addition), [it] is dedicated to showing off new and established Australian poets to the world. The journal posits the immortal phrase ‘words are bullets’ by promoting irreverent and experimental poetics." It also features guest editors for each issue, which I thought was interesting. The review features art, essays, interviews, and translations in addition to the poetry. I browsed through the issue, and found a lot of interesting pieces (and the accompanying artwork was enjoyable) but many of the pieces were heavily formatted, and it would have been too tough to recreate here (I guess I should have expected that with experimental poetry). I would of course suggest reading them anyway! This one, Dropstitch amused me particularly as I like to knit. 

Weekend Words

A little early this week as I am going to Portland, OR this weekend. Hopefully to Powell's as well to get some new texts.

8/9/14

Grasshopper doesn’t stop snapping

as I walk past,

Content is he to defend his earthly prize

in the swaying towers of grasses

and clods of thirsty earth.

His metronome needed tuning, so I slapped

the mail stack against my thigh,

but I forgot;

the frequency gets turned up with the heat,

and I didn’t know the beat

for 85.

Grasshopper’s sassy legs may bring him trouble,

if he’s not careful, a bird

will end his jazz.