Stranded
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait.
Latitude is not the only
Missing piece—our histories
Unsettled. There are
Opposites to consider.
Thumbs need hitching
If we’re gonna get out.
ER
But oh, "opposites" is really only a place holder until something better comes along; aren't we all?
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
I'm still squinting at it, there will be touch-ups:
Stranded
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait—
Gibbons move into place,
A sweet connection colors
The harness grazing face.
Latitude is not the only
Missing piece. There are
Impulses to consider.
ER
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait—
Gibbons move into place,
A sweet connection colors
The harness grazing face.
Latitude is not the only
Missing piece. There are
Impulses to consider.
ER
Friday, January 15, 2010
About Love:
"But as Thomas Merton said, one day you wake up and realize religion is ridiculous and that you will stick with it anyway. What love is ever any different?"
Thursday, January 14, 2010
A Process:
On the composition of Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale:"
"Keats did not record these few hours in 'Ode to a Nightingale.' In the poem, the bird sings 'in some melodious plot / Of beechen green' (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is 'night' or 'midnight' (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird 'on the viewless wings of Poesy' (33) and only returning to himself when his 'fancy' fails, its spell broken by a word, 'forlorn' (71-74).[...] Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word 'forlorn,' Keats comes 'back' to his 'sole self,' that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced..." (Lancashire)
Or, so often, the act of writing a poem interrupts the poem being written. I can write a poem only when I got to this place, oh, on the left side of my head, three inches or so behind my eye (or so it feels afterwards) where poems, or the words for poems, are made, or are waiting. If I know I'm there I'm no longer there, then I'm in the front of my head. I can feel it afterward, when I read a line back that came from there I can recognize it as having come from that place in my brain--a line that doesn't sound like a poem, but belongs in one because it doesn't sound like a line in a poem. Then I have to get back there to write the next line, sometimes I get back there right away, sometimes I sit for a long time before I let me back in. Sometimes that waiting looks like me sitting in front or a blinking cursor. Sometimes I write through it and lines that want to be in poems, that sound like lines in poems and that's why they don't belong in one, try to sneak in undetected. Most times I catch them, lately, usually I am too tired of fighting with the poem and let in an impostor. But then it usually poisons the poem and I have to start again.
Take now for example, I wrote a "good" poem last night, and a "good" poem the night before, and right now I am letting a new "poem" settle. I wrote it, it is still hot, and has to cool for me to check it for impostors. Let's go see if it's ready...
...
...
...ok, I'm back. Verdict: an eight line poem is comprised of 5 lines of impostors and three real lines of poetry that are nearly ruined. An interesting turn of events: one of the impostors is made real by the deletion of the other 4:
The "Poem:"
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.
The Impostors:
Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.
The lines of poetry:
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
The "converted" impostor:
My posture responds
The new part of a poem:
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
My posture responds
I remember "My posture responds" coming from that poetry place in my brain, but then impostors hitched their talons into the real line and muddled it. However, the word "responds" is setting off the alarms and sounding really "poemy" to me...
I won't here go into your affect on the poem, for "[t]o recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering." Your heart of course is the last thing to shape anything I write.
"Keats did not record these few hours in 'Ode to a Nightingale.' In the poem, the bird sings 'in some melodious plot / Of beechen green' (8-9), not in a plum-tree. The time is 'night' or 'midnight' (35, 56), not a morning after breakfast. The season is summer (10, 50), not spring. Keats' imagination transmutes what he experiences under the plum-tree. He acknowledges, for this reason, flying up to the bird 'on the viewless wings of Poesy' (33) and only returning to himself when his 'fancy' fails, its spell broken by a word, 'forlorn' (71-74).[...] Imagination ends the experience it initiated. At the word 'forlorn,' Keats comes 'back' to his 'sole self,' that is, the self left alone by its flying double. He becomes conscious of what he has experienced..." (Lancashire)
Or, so often, the act of writing a poem interrupts the poem being written. I can write a poem only when I got to this place, oh, on the left side of my head, three inches or so behind my eye (or so it feels afterwards) where poems, or the words for poems, are made, or are waiting. If I know I'm there I'm no longer there, then I'm in the front of my head. I can feel it afterward, when I read a line back that came from there I can recognize it as having come from that place in my brain--a line that doesn't sound like a poem, but belongs in one because it doesn't sound like a line in a poem. Then I have to get back there to write the next line, sometimes I get back there right away, sometimes I sit for a long time before I let me back in. Sometimes that waiting looks like me sitting in front or a blinking cursor. Sometimes I write through it and lines that want to be in poems, that sound like lines in poems and that's why they don't belong in one, try to sneak in undetected. Most times I catch them, lately, usually I am too tired of fighting with the poem and let in an impostor. But then it usually poisons the poem and I have to start again.
Take now for example, I wrote a "good" poem last night, and a "good" poem the night before, and right now I am letting a new "poem" settle. I wrote it, it is still hot, and has to cool for me to check it for impostors. Let's go see if it's ready...
...
...
...ok, I'm back. Verdict: an eight line poem is comprised of 5 lines of impostors and three real lines of poetry that are nearly ruined. An interesting turn of events: one of the impostors is made real by the deletion of the other 4:
The "Poem:"
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.
The Impostors:
Or are filled up while they wait.
Loneliness fogs over me
My posture responds
Suspicions confirmed
Animals wait for the signal.
The lines of poetry:
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
The "converted" impostor:
My posture responds
The new part of a poem:
The exercise enacts bravery.
In this column a thorny side
The other columns wait
My posture responds
I remember "My posture responds" coming from that poetry place in my brain, but then impostors hitched their talons into the real line and muddled it. However, the word "responds" is setting off the alarms and sounding really "poemy" to me...
I won't here go into your affect on the poem, for "[t]o recreate the nightingale's song, we must listen in the context of human suffering." Your heart of course is the last thing to shape anything I write.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
For You:
Sheltered Garden
I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest--
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.
I have had enough--
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch--
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent--
only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light--
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit--
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
With a russet coat.
Or the melon--
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste--
it is better to taste of frost--
the exquisite frost--
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves--
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince--
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
H.D.
I have had enough.
I gasp for breath.
Every way ends, every road,
every foot-path leads at last
to the hill-crest--
then you retrace your steps,
or find the same slope on the other side,
precipitate.
I have had enough--
border-pinks, clove-pinks, wax-lilies,
herbs, sweet-cress.
O for some sharp swish of a branch--
there is no scent of resin
in this place,
no taste of bark, of coarse weeds,
aromatic, astringent--
only border on border of scented pinks.
Have you seen fruit under cover
that wanted light--
pears wadded in cloth,
protected from the frost,
melons, almost ripe,
smothered in straw?
Why not let the pears cling
to the empty branch?
All your coaxing will only make
a bitter fruit--
let them cling, ripen of themselves,
test their own worth,
nipped, shrivelled by the frost,
to fall at last but fair
With a russet coat.
Or the melon--
let it bleach yellow
in the winter light,
even tart to the taste--
it is better to taste of frost--
the exquisite frost--
than of wadding and of dead grass.
For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks,
snap off their spiced heads,
fling them about with dead leaves--
spread the paths with twigs,
limbs broken off,
trail great pine branches,
hurled from some far wood
right across the melon-patch,
break pear and quince--
leave half-trees, torn, twisted
but showing the fight was valiant.
O to blot out this garden
to forget, to find a new beauty
in some terrible
wind-tortured place.
H.D.
A Great Example of Ashbery:
Some Trees
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance
To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
And glad not to have invented
Some comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges
A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Place in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.
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