She Tries To Explain
then sees
her
hands are muddy. I'm restless,
she says
and he pushes
his hand
up under
her skirt
and proves
that every action
has an equal
opposite
reaction,
and she
moves away. I'm restless she says
and he tries to
hold her; when his stroking turns
to torpor and his eyes
close, she says no, and walks
to the
window; watches geese
fly in formation
and their order soothes. In the middle
of dinner, she stops
eating.
Draws light
circles on the linens with her fork,
and he comes around
her chair
and touches her where her skin is bare
on arms, up into hair,
and she looks through
him as he memorizes her skin until she
sighs, stands up and begins
to see
him
in the way
he watches their next door
neighbor
hanging
her husband's shirts: her stretch, her bend
plays
him like a chord
and leaves
her feeling
like a sack of feed, so she walks out the door
and rides a bus
to the
museum. Has a
conversation
with a blind man who throws
pots.
He listens
to her voice, describes
the feel of clay, the way his hands just follow air
till they meet muddy weight, and understand the shape of the pot
from what is
not
pot and he
separates
the two
quite carefully
until he has
a finished piece-- that makes her laugh, then realize
the way
her eyes crease are a signal: everything is signaling, but not a blink gets
through
her arms,
her mouth, her hair, her sigh, her golden laughter
brings nothing on but words
more words, more wonderful words on wheels
from the blind man throwing pots because
it makes her laugh, and suddenly, more than anything, she wants to
dance for him.
Thinking the muffin
The wall was holding up. The defences were strong. It was never going to be easy.
"Bergson on memory without any madeleines?" they jeered, "you must be mad."
You can buy a bag of madeleines at the cornershop for around a pound. They make your mouth furry because they are cheaply produced. Good lord! is this muck supposed to bring back memories of my aunt?
"Has anyone read Proust?" he began. My heart fluttered, then sank. "The cake...you know."
We did indeed know.
"He ate the cake and his distant past was brought to mind."
There are a number of things we may learn from this.
i) Proust shouldn't have been translated,
ii) There is evidence for bringing back (or continuing with) the death penalty.
iii) Proust wrote 6000-pages to clarify the muffin matter. If publishers had asked him to trim the work down into an accessible 20-page pamphlet, he would have agreed.
Long live philosophy!
"Bergson on memory without any madeleines?" they jeered, "you must be mad."
You can buy a bag of madeleines at the cornershop for around a pound. They make your mouth furry because they are cheaply produced. Good lord! is this muck supposed to bring back memories of my aunt?
"Has anyone read Proust?" he began. My heart fluttered, then sank. "The cake...you know."
We did indeed know.
"He ate the cake and his distant past was brought to mind."
There are a number of things we may learn from this.
i) Proust shouldn't have been translated,
ii) There is evidence for bringing back (or continuing with) the death penalty.
iii) Proust wrote 6000-pages to clarify the muffin matter. If publishers had asked him to trim the work down into an accessible 20-page pamphlet, he would have agreed.
Long live philosophy!
Sunrise 1987, border of Tunisia and Algeria, without a mark on me
Sitting on the rise of sand
re-taking the breath that had left you during
the sand storm, when your dune buggy sank as it was
buffetted by the winds, as you watched the windows
grow ever darker and thought about the next vehicle
where your parents were vainly watching their own
darkening windows, you clenched a taureg boy's
blue-tinged hands and couldn't say why you weren't
on fire
Now blue is the color of that lost breath you take in
sitting as the rise of sand over those whistling
machines, fading tea kettles where the water is the human life within
and the static sky recording where sixteen were buried is your
eye on new horrors every day, equally emphatic on distance
Those shaking attempts at deep breath you exhume the bodies
with from memory is interruption, fork from meal, as your
mind reluctantly turns to news captions, and every blink
the eye takes from those loses the face of loss, growing ever bluer
in the desert, a bright flowering of that dark plain, hunchbacked
with the sun rising on it in 1987 when you fell in love
with the whole human tribe while being buried indelibly alive.
re-taking the breath that had left you during
the sand storm, when your dune buggy sank as it was
buffetted by the winds, as you watched the windows
grow ever darker and thought about the next vehicle
where your parents were vainly watching their own
darkening windows, you clenched a taureg boy's
blue-tinged hands and couldn't say why you weren't
on fire
Now blue is the color of that lost breath you take in
sitting as the rise of sand over those whistling
machines, fading tea kettles where the water is the human life within
and the static sky recording where sixteen were buried is your
eye on new horrors every day, equally emphatic on distance
Those shaking attempts at deep breath you exhume the bodies
with from memory is interruption, fork from meal, as your
mind reluctantly turns to news captions, and every blink
the eye takes from those loses the face of loss, growing ever bluer
in the desert, a bright flowering of that dark plain, hunchbacked
with the sun rising on it in 1987 when you fell in love
with the whole human tribe while being buried indelibly alive.
Besr Poets
At the touch of love everyone becomes a poet
to say you don't like poetry is to say you don't much care for literature ...art ...thinking and
feeling ...or ...life! (and remember good poetry is not bad poetry)
ok than! Do you have any poetry?
All poems without bylines are by me
the best poets in my opinion are Douglas Florian, Aileen Fisher, and Margaret Hillert
John Ashbery, it seems, is America's Best poet
Donald Hall is America's second Best poet
Iraqis like to say they are the best poets in the Arab world
some of the best poets have been written in Spanish for children
Karl Shapiro wrote the best poems he could
the best poets from Northern Ireland have made an issue of poetic form
poets are literate, poets control, poets command syntax and lexicon - but the best poets also write without knowing everything
Got a good poet inside you?
The best poets are far too deep, far too complex, for convenient Post-It labels
better poets can drop in and just give a handy tip shouldn't we?
I've gone to an MFA program to help myself become a better poet
it took me a long time to realise that the British practice was to publicise the worst poets and keep the best ones
many poets don't write poems about me
to say you don't like poetry is to say you don't much care for literature ...art ...thinking and
feeling ...or ...life! (and remember good poetry is not bad poetry)
ok than! Do you have any poetry?
All poems without bylines are by me
the best poets in my opinion are Douglas Florian, Aileen Fisher, and Margaret Hillert
John Ashbery, it seems, is America's Best poet
Donald Hall is America's second Best poet
Iraqis like to say they are the best poets in the Arab world
some of the best poets have been written in Spanish for children
Karl Shapiro wrote the best poems he could
the best poets from Northern Ireland have made an issue of poetic form
poets are literate, poets control, poets command syntax and lexicon - but the best poets also write without knowing everything
Got a good poet inside you?
The best poets are far too deep, far too complex, for convenient Post-It labels
better poets can drop in and just give a handy tip shouldn't we?
I've gone to an MFA program to help myself become a better poet
it took me a long time to realise that the British practice was to publicise the worst poets and keep the best ones
many poets don't write poems about me
re: survey (canada banana)
Canada Banana
Canada Banana
Literary illiteracy
Portaging to cabins
Our various versions of
Portacabin virgins
Just like in the movies
Canada Banana
Civically serious
Pantomimes of
Ars and arses
Panting pantless
Just like real politics
Canada Banana
I don’t mean the Rideau or
Ducks eating wet snow
Up in the Gatineau
Or dead poets in the morning.
I like the idea of the survey. In other places recently I have attempted the same thing in the form of a game:
four games for poets
1. Poetic Whispers/Selected Works
Start a blog. Find a poem by a living poet who also has a blog and select it. Put it on your blog. Ask that poet to select someone else's and put it on his but only if he will select someone else's and keep the chain going. Link the blogs. The selected poems make an expanding book which can be analysed by blocked academics to find the real state of poetry.
2. Ultimatum
A game especially interesting for critics and observers of Popular Culture. Can be played with above.
This is a variation on economic gaming theory which will model the degree of elitism, corruption and denial of access involved in hierarchies of poets and academics chained to the wheel of diminishing grants, occupation of chairs by cronies and so on where a thousand poets fight over every three available footnotes like rats in a sack over shit. This is where short term memory of friendship and comradeship is so dysfunctional as not to take them back to the beginning of their own sentences -- all this while the consciousness of the nation rots.
Anyway. Form two teams of poets. Those published a lot and those who aren't. The first is team x, the second is team 'why'.
Accumulate enough money (called 'GrantCant') so everyone in x can have $20 (or pieces of silver). Design a book so that everyone in x has two publishing spots (called 'Patron Places') to decide on as to who will fill them. The book can be called 'Critical Community'. Tell each person in team 'why' they can award one 'GrantCant' and one 'Patron Place' to a person in team x. That person can share them or not. Then watch what happens. Can be played at the same time as below. If this game took place with Ugandan poets they would share the silver and the places.
3. Prismers of Parochialism
Find someone around who speaks say arabic or farsi, maybe welsh gaelic or mandarin. Or write to someone who does.Then, if you don't know anything about that language look it up. See how it goes.What it does. It may even be something like Nigerian English.
After that, find a poem or a something you did that you think might sound good in that language as it is described as being like and which might become animated with that cultural charge ( maybe one yours doesn't have, like national weeping). Get it translated and try it out on the person you have picked. Or get the person you have picked to do it. I found that didactic things come out very lyrical in arabic when translated by Palestinians, or so I'm told. Imagistic things in mandarin of mine are minimalist.
But they are coherent. I was afraid to try Polish but I'm doing a fat chapbook in Albanian. That'll show them. Anyway, after that get a poem back. Change it around. The one you get back is their choice. Don't push for poems about the war. And so on.
There you go, the beginning of world peace. Reverse Babylon. If the other guy wants and needs and if you are linguistically dysfunctional help them with one in English (one thing I found out doing this is that I translate ok into American, better than in Oakville Ontario. Except in West Virginia.)
4. The rules and objectives of game four I have written elsewhere.
-Richard (www.blueorangepublishing.co.uk
Canada Banana
Literary illiteracy
Portaging to cabins
Our various versions of
Portacabin virgins
Just like in the movies
Canada Banana
Civically serious
Pantomimes of
Ars and arses
Panting pantless
Just like real politics
Canada Banana
I don’t mean the Rideau or
Ducks eating wet snow
Up in the Gatineau
Or dead poets in the morning.
I like the idea of the survey. In other places recently I have attempted the same thing in the form of a game:
four games for poets
1. Poetic Whispers/Selected Works
Start a blog. Find a poem by a living poet who also has a blog and select it. Put it on your blog. Ask that poet to select someone else's and put it on his but only if he will select someone else's and keep the chain going. Link the blogs. The selected poems make an expanding book which can be analysed by blocked academics to find the real state of poetry.
2. Ultimatum
A game especially interesting for critics and observers of Popular Culture. Can be played with above.
This is a variation on economic gaming theory which will model the degree of elitism, corruption and denial of access involved in hierarchies of poets and academics chained to the wheel of diminishing grants, occupation of chairs by cronies and so on where a thousand poets fight over every three available footnotes like rats in a sack over shit. This is where short term memory of friendship and comradeship is so dysfunctional as not to take them back to the beginning of their own sentences -- all this while the consciousness of the nation rots.
Anyway. Form two teams of poets. Those published a lot and those who aren't. The first is team x, the second is team 'why'.
Accumulate enough money (called 'GrantCant') so everyone in x can have $20 (or pieces of silver). Design a book so that everyone in x has two publishing spots (called 'Patron Places') to decide on as to who will fill them. The book can be called 'Critical Community'. Tell each person in team 'why' they can award one 'GrantCant' and one 'Patron Place' to a person in team x. That person can share them or not. Then watch what happens. Can be played at the same time as below. If this game took place with Ugandan poets they would share the silver and the places.
3. Prismers of Parochialism
Find someone around who speaks say arabic or farsi, maybe welsh gaelic or mandarin. Or write to someone who does.Then, if you don't know anything about that language look it up. See how it goes.What it does. It may even be something like Nigerian English.
After that, find a poem or a something you did that you think might sound good in that language as it is described as being like and which might become animated with that cultural charge ( maybe one yours doesn't have, like national weeping). Get it translated and try it out on the person you have picked. Or get the person you have picked to do it. I found that didactic things come out very lyrical in arabic when translated by Palestinians, or so I'm told. Imagistic things in mandarin of mine are minimalist.
But they are coherent. I was afraid to try Polish but I'm doing a fat chapbook in Albanian. That'll show them. Anyway, after that get a poem back. Change it around. The one you get back is their choice. Don't push for poems about the war. And so on.
There you go, the beginning of world peace. Reverse Babylon. If the other guy wants and needs and if you are linguistically dysfunctional help them with one in English (one thing I found out doing this is that I translate ok into American, better than in Oakville Ontario. Except in West Virginia.)
4. The rules and objectives of game four I have written elsewhere.
-Richard (www.blueorangepublishing.co.uk
a survey
1)
how would you define
yrself as a poet
given where you live
and what you read
and where you've have published
both offline and online
2)
how would you define
writing thru regions
how would you define
regional writing now
(also posted at really bad movies)
Dinky Alp
This mimics burning.
Wry burning.
All our longing just to lay
a dry trophy for Moloch burning.
I crawl among slow motion crashings of worlds
and a roar i call mankind burning.
Tricks i try
as if that frolic could abolish burning.
It's not anything's finish,
it's only burning.
Patch of grass scorch growing out.
What was it but a vast myth, burning?
Grinchus rolls
by ruby burning.
Wry burning.
All our longing just to lay
a dry trophy for Moloch burning.
I crawl among slow motion crashings of worlds
and a roar i call mankind burning.
Tricks i try
as if that frolic could abolish burning.
It's not anything's finish,
it's only burning.
Patch of grass scorch growing out.
What was it but a vast myth, burning?
Grinchus rolls
by ruby burning.
A Love that Kills
kiss the death from my eyes
before i grope the void
i suffice in the shadow of your dream
hear my call in soundless wonder
a phantom bubble burst in exile
sprinkles the ocean
i am the grain of sand time discounts
you be the door i open into rapture
whence you kiss my breath
sweeten my dream before i sleep
and finally awakened
gasping!
the color of life
that so torments
billy jno hope
kiss the death from my eyes
before i grope the void
i suffice in the shadow of your dream
hear my call in soundless wonder
a phantom bubble burst in exile
sprinkles the ocean
i am the grain of sand time discounts
you be the door i open into rapture
whence you kiss my breath
sweeten my dream before i sleep
and finally awakened
gasping!
the color of life
that so torments
billy jno hope
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)