And Suddenly... Poetry!

Happily for you, it's not my own poetry but someone who was really good at it.  

From C P Cavafy, as translated by Rae Dalven

Candles

The days of our future stand before us

like a row of little lighted candles--

golden, warm, and lively little candles. 

The days gone by remain behind us, 

a mournful line of burnt-out candles:

the nearest ones are still smoking, 

cold candles, melted and bent.

I do not want to look at them; their form saddens me,

and it saddens me to recall their first light.

I look ahead at my lighted candles. 

I do not want to turn back, lest I see and shudder--

how quickly the somber line lenghthens, 

how quickly the burnt-out candles multiply.    

###

An Old Man

In the inner room of the noisy cafe

and old man sits bent over a table; 

a newspaper before him, no companion beside him. 

And in the scorn of his miserable old age, 

he meditates how little he enjoyed the years

when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.

He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it, 

and yet the time when he was young seems like 

yesterday.  How short a time, how short a time.  

And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;

and how he always trusted her--what folly!--

the liar who would say, "Tomorrow.  You have ample time."

He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much 

joy he sacrificed.  Every lost chance

now mocks his senseless prudence.  

...  But with so much thinking and remembering

the old man reels.  And he dozes off 

bent over the table of the cafe.  

###

Walls 

Without consideration, without pity, without shame

they have built big and high walls around me. 

And now I sit here despairing. 

I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.

Ah why didn't I observe them when they were building the walls?

But I never heard the noise or the sound of the builders.

Imperceptibly they shut me out of the world.  

###

There are many other really really good ones that I like, "Ithaca" and "The City" but I'm too lazy to type them out.  So go find a copy and read Cavafy's for yourself.  

Tie-Over Poetry

To keep you entertained until I post my comments on Openly Straight (hopefully tomorrow) some poems by Robert Hedin from his collection "County O."

Owls
     --for William Pitt Root

Owls glide off the thin
Wrists of the night,
And using snow for their feathers
Drift down on either side
Of the wind.

I spot them
As I camp along the ridge,
Glistening over the streambeds
Their eyes small rooms
Lit by stone lamps.
###

Last Poet

This man is a lover
Of canyon walls.
The first to read by moon alone.

During the day
He lives away from the sun,
Prone in the cool dirt
Under ledges,
Revising that one long last narrative line
On sheets of mica.

Now is the time
He chooses his closest friends:
A piece of jagged rock,
A cricket who's run out of songs.

Near evening
He makes his way to a precipice
And scours
The stones for scratches
Other than his own.

And as the moon curls over the rim
He recites his work
From memory,
Then listens as the canyon reads back
Again and again.
And then he claps
And the whole canyon applauds.
###

End

At the end of the open road we come to ourselves
                                            --Louis Simpson

All right, Louis
                         we're here
We're here at the end of the open road,
At the end of our ellipsis.

A wind and slight drizzle hide
Any other footprints.
They curl the road
Around our feet,
Sweeping it back into itself.

Louis, in the darkness we think
We see trees, giant sequoias
That break around an open marsh,
And are compelled to give them green,
To give them sway,
A hard mossy bark,
Rain dripping from their leaves.

Listen.  A bullfrog's call.
Smell the wet calm in the air.

We wait for the moon,
For the song of the white bird

Any backdrop
                        of light.
###

Transcanadian

At this speed our origins are groundless.
We are nearing the eve of a great festival,
The festival of wind.
Already you can see this road weakening.
Soon it will breathe
And lift away to dry its feathers in the air.
On both sides the fields of rapeseed and sunflowers
Are revolting against their rows.
Soon they will scatter wildly like pheasants.
Now is the time, my friend, to test our souls.
We must let them forage for themselves,
But first--unbuckle your skin.
Out here, in the darkness
Between two shimmering cities,
We have, perhaps for the last time, chance
Neither to be shut nor open, but to let
Our souls speak and carry our bodies like capes.
###

That last one reminds me a Khalil Gibran for some reason.  I think Owls is simply amazing and the type of thing most people wish they could write with they say they want to start writing poetry.  There is some heavy word repetition and imagery as well but for the most part I've really enjoyed this collection.  

SHAZAAM!

As to not deprive my massive readership any longer I figured I'd post some examples of what I'm reading since I'm not posting about what I've read.

The General Law of Oblivion

Mr. Proust called it: the beloved gone so long
you forget what he/she looks like,
no matter portraits, photos, or memory,
which is the best tool for forgetting.
Though one cannot deny
its genius, Mr Proust's prose
kills me, it loops
me over and out.  Is it just French novelist
who don't know how to end
a sentence and so love the semicolon ("the period
that leaks") they can't write two lines
without one?  And I am so godamned tired
of hearing about that cookie!
As if he were the first (first fish were!) to notice
the powers of the olfactory!  But
about the General Law of Oblivion
he had it zeroed: "It breaks my heart
that I am going to forget you," he said
in a last letter to a friend.
The length and music of that sentence
is perfect, in English or in French.

#
Put the Bandage on the Sword and Not the Wound

It must hurt, too, the sword, heated to red (exactly: burnt
orange) hot, beaten and beaten, hard,
by a strong arm
and a hammer
up and down its long body, plunged
in icy water,
then beaten again
and the grinding, the awful grinding
of stone on steel
before the thick and bitter taste of blood
on its lip.

#
Midmorning,

accompanied by bees
banging the screen,
blind to it between them
and the blooms
on the sill, I turn pages,
just as desperate as they
to get where I am going.
Earlier, I tried to summon
my nervous friend,
a hummingbird, with sugar
water.  The ants go there first.
Now, one shrill bird
makes its noise too often,
too close: ch-pecha, ch-pecha-pecha.
If he'd eat the caterpillars
)in sizes S to XXL!) eating my tomatoes,
we could live as neighbors, but
why can't he keep quiet
like the spiders and snakes?
I spoke to an exterminator
once who said he'd poison
birds but he didn't want me
to write about it.  I have not
until now, and now starts up
that black genius, the crow,
who is answered by the blue
bully, the ubiquitous, the utterly
American, jay.

#
Three poems from Thomas Lux's (did I do that right?  The 'x' apostrophe thing looks odd and even sounds funny.) God Particles.

You're welcome.  :)

(Three poems and a smiley face?!  Wow, I'm being super generous today.)

Audience Participation Poetry!

So I can admit that in reading The Best American Poetry 2006 Edited by Billy Collins that I skipped to Thomas Lux's poem first.  Among other topics mentioned in his introduction, Collins says he likes to laugh.  I've said before that I think humor is a trademark of some of the best fiction out there with no regard to genre.  Perhaps it holds true for poetry as well.  

How cool is this?

Eyes Scooped Out and Replaced by Hot Coals by Thomas Lux

The above, the punishment, the mild
but just punishment, symbolic,
the great advancement our planet
most needs.
The procedure is painless,
using methods currently available
only in cartoons.  Polls were taken,
it was voted upon overwhelmingly in favor.
The justness of it,
known in the bone
by each of our nation--is undeniable.  Thus, it is proclaimed,
on this day anno domino, ect., I, the final arbiter
and ultimate enforcer
of such things (appointed by the king!), make official
and binding, this: that the eyes shall be gouged out
and replaced by hot coals
in the head, the blockhead,
of each countryman or woman who,
upon reaching their majority,
has yet to read
Moby Dick, by Mr. Herman Melville (1819-1891), American novelist
and poet.

Lux's note on the poem:  "I think of 'Eyes Scooped Out and Replaced by Hot Coals' as an audience participation poem, i.e., readers may replace the book mentioned in the poem with a beloved book of their choice."

The nature of the poem, and subsequent punishment, suggest that when filling in the blank one can't nominate a book published yesterday.  I think I would have to go with The French Lieutenant's  Woman, but I could just as easily say The Color Purple, or Notes From Underground, or I, Claudius.  I mean really who could pick just one book?   

Two questions: how would you fill in the blank and seriously how cool was that poem?

Now, read it again for full effect.

A productive Day

About two weeks ago I started volunteering at the library.  The branch I'm working in has gone from 32 to 11 staff members over the course of a year.  Shelving is the top concern and from what I've been told--at this particular branch--100% of the shelving is done by volunteers.  Now if you can't already tell, I've outed myself as an incomparable nerd: I'm volunteering at a library…

I'll throw in the salt: I kinda like it.

It's a very relaxing environment and I'm around books for a few hours.  I'm not doing much shelving though.  I would think it's normal to attract bookish people with a volunteer position at a library, in my brief experience this is highly detrimental to getting anything done.

I see books that look interesting, authors who I always meant to look into but haven't, and I discover new stuff faster than I can make notes to look into it later.  I was there for about two hours today.  I'm not sure how well my time was spent in regards to doing the library a service but I did leave with six books, to go with the seven others I already have checked out.

One of the librarians who has known me for sometime, and who knows my reading tendencies, asked if I was planning on reading anything of these particular books anytime soon.  She is the same librarian who makes special notes for my books I get that can't be renewed and must be returned within two weeks.  I told her yes, and I was being serious.  "I plan on reading them all tonight."

I meant that, but it's a bit like Thanksgiving dinner when my eyes are bigger than my stomach.  I have such good intentions.

In effort to keep my poetry interest alive and well and not solely focused on Thomas Lux (which certainly isn't a bad thing) I was doing so researching into finding other poets that may be of interest to me.  I learned a very interesting assertion: in some literary spheres 'accessible' in relation to poetry is a bad word.  I roll my eyes at that but what do I know?  It would seem accessible poetry is synonymous with "Billy Collins;" a poet that regularly gets six figure deals because (the horror) he apparently writes stuff that people want to read (the shame).  So of the stack of six books I left with today, it should be no surprise that one is a book of his poems, which I plan to read first.

Another of the six is The Best American Poetry 2006 of which Collins was guest editor.  Assuming Collins is both good at what he does and of interest to me this collection has the potential to be a gateway of sorts for in diversifying my poetry interest.  

A glass of wine and a book is my order for this evening.

Some very gripping words

This is a taste, a teaser as to where I've been lately and what I've been reading.

Adultery by John Siddique

Finally I reached across the table
to touch your face, the pads of my fingers
on your forehead first, drawing down near
the inner edge of your ear and under
to hold your chin, lifting your head slightly
as if I'm about to kiss you.

We are burning as if we are adulterers.
The table is between us to keep us apart.
I think if we are going to have to pay for this,
I want to have at least touched your skin.
we do not kiss, don't go home, or make love,
we drink tea--green for you, regular black tea
for me.  I eat, you say you can't.

We are adulterers of talk and desire,
pretending that by not coming together
we are somehow still standing on the good side
of the line.

we sit amongst other lovers, no one know
we are not supposed to be, say my name, you say,
and I say it.  I want to show you so many things,
you say.  It goes right into the place
I have covered up and armoured, to pretend
it no longer existed.  
***


Memorial Day by John Siddique

Sunday late Spring sun ascends
over section 60 of Arlington Cemetery,
as girl scouts plant small plastic flags
on the rows of graves.

Music of bugles, silence of prayers
learned especially for today.
Drums strike the air,
a beautiful war day across these States.

Sections 1 through 60; there could be
generations of families here,  
great-great-grandfather down to only son,
perhaps a daughter now.

The sun ascends t fall over the years
which march forward in dignified rows,
war by war, and white stone by white stone,
peace by peace, ending by ending.
***

Now if you really want you're mind blown I'll tell you that Siddique's book of poetry Full Blood contains stuff even better than what I've shared here.

It's all about one word

I like this poem for a host of reasons, but there is all of one word that really makes the whole thing pop; at least for me.  (Actually, there are two but one is greater than the other.)

Can you find it?

At The Far End of a Long Wharf by Thomas Lux

At the far end of a long wharf
a deaf child, while fishing, hauls in
a large eel and -- not
because it is ugly -- she bashes its brains
out of eeldom on the hot
planks -- whamp, whamp, whamp, a sound
she does not hear.  It's the distance
and the heat that abstracts
the image for me.  She also does not hear,
nor do I, the splash the eel makes
when she tosses it in her bucket,
nor do we hear the new bait
pierced by the clean hook, nor
its lowering into the water again.
Nobody could.  I watch her
all afternoon until, catching nothing
else, she walks the wharf toward
me, her cousin, thinking
with a thousand fingers.  Pointing
at our boat she tells me
to drag it to the water.  She wants me to row
her out to the deep lanes of fish.
Poetry is a menial task.

My First Poetry Thoughts

So this is scary.  Because if you start talking about poetry surely there's something wrong with you, right?  I mean really, how much more elitist can you be?

I've had a poetry itch for months now and I've been cruising blogs and reading a lot of online but hesitant to say anything because I suck at reading poetry and I'm acutely aware of this fact.  I've check out a copy of The Best American Poetry 2012 edited by Mark Doty and David Lehman.  I only know one name of the contributors and not because I'm familiar with her work rather I know her personally from my writer's group.  (And if you don't know her, in recent months Natasha Trethewey has become a really big deal.  Congrats!)

I like how clean and concise poetry is and how it can be open to interpretation.  I like narrative or humorous poems better than dark and brooding.  I hate the obscure, seemingly random punctuation, indentation, and inexplicable word placement on a page.  That's about as in-depth as I can express my preferences in poetry.  It's odd how I can talk more about a well made doble bock or rum than a poem.

I like this particular collection because it seems to be varied in subject matter and presentation.  I really like how the authors contribute their thoughts on the poem chosen for inclusion as it helps me better understand their work.  I find some poems that I think are amazing and I re read them five or six times or until I get desensitized to how amazing I originally thought it was.  Some poems I don't get; I move on.  Some poems I don't get and they manage to make me angry.  Some poems I don't get and I say, "What the hell was that?"  But it's worth it to find the ones I enjoy.

Since I suck so much ass at telling you why I like the poetry I like I thought I'd share a few.  The ones I'm sharing are short because I'm too lazy to write out the longer ones.  I don't claim to understand these poems; only that they got a reaction out of me in some way or another.  These are but a few from this anthology that I've really enjoyed.  


Child Holding Potato by Rick Barot

When my sister got her diagnosis, 

I bought an airplane ticket

but to another city, where I stared

at paintings that seemed victorious

in their relation to time:

the beech from two hundred years ago,

its trunk a palette of mud

and gilt; the man with olive-black

gloves, the sky behind him

a glacier of blue light.  In their calm

landscapes, the saints.  Still dripping

the garden's dew, the bouquets.

Holding the rough gold orb 

of a potato, the Child cradled

by the glowing Madonna.  Then,

the paintings I looked at the longest:

the bowls of plums and peaches,

the lemons, the pomegranates

like red earths.  In my mouth, 

the raw starch.  In my mouth, the dirt.  

***

Dorothy Wordsworth by Jennifer Chang

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.

I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings

about the spastic sun that shines and shines

and shines.  How are they any different 

from me?  I, too, have a big messy head

on a fragile stalk.  I spin with the wind.

I flower and don't apologize.  There's nothing

funny about good weather.  Oh, spring again, 

the critics nod.  They know the old joy, 

that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot

of future growing things, each one 

labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then

this would be an important poem.  Then 

the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore

declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth.  O, Flower, one said, why aren't you

meat?  But I won't be another bashful shank.  

The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,

the lilacs their taunt.  Fractious petals, stop

interrupting my poem with boring beauty.

All the boys are in the field gnawing raw

bones of ambition and calling it ardor.  Who

the hell are they?  This is a poem about war.    

***

At the End of Life, a Secret by Reginald Dwayne Betts

Everything measured.  A man twists

a tuft of your hair out for no reason

other than you are naked before him

and he is bored.  Moments ago he was

weighting your gallbladder, and then

he was staring at the empty space where 

your lungs were.  Even dead, we still say

you are an organ donor, as if something

other than taxes outlast death.  Your feet

are regular feet.  Two of them,

and there is no mark to suggest you were 

an expert mathematician, that you were 

the first runner-up in debate championships,

1956, Tapioca, Illinois.  From that time your body 

was carted before him, to the time your

dead body is being sent to the coffin,

every pound is accounted for, except 22 grams.

The man is a praying man & has figured

what it means.  He says this is the soul, finally, 

after the breath has gone.  The soul: less than

4,000 dollars' worth of crack--22 grams--

all that moves you through this world.  

***

Poems aren't novels and they aren't short stories, but somehow the good ones seem to be a bit of both at once.  So what do you think?  Do I like weird stuff?  I'm certainly open to recommendations.    

Oh, and if you want to be taken seriously it helps if your poem is about death and you use the word 'quotidian.'  Seriously, that word is used 32 times through 41 pages in this anthology...