This Ain't No Charlie Brown

Wither Whithers?

Some CPR With CCR

Should Poets Retire?

Athletes do it - and I don't mean using steroids. Professionals from most walks of life do it. So why shouldn't poets meet mandatory conditions for retirement? What if the creative spark blows out and does not rekindle in phoenix-life fashion? Might this happen at any age or is it age-specific? (Have I asked enough questions already?)

Is there an age when one's poetic acuity wanes? The mind after all, much like its fleshy counterpart declines in later years. Are some more established (perhaps over-established) poets rehashing old rhetoric - much like a one-trick pony? Difficult to say isn't it, since the creative process cannot be quantifiably studied, measured and/or defined. What triggers a creative episode in one poet might very well have no effect in another.

I had better stop thinking about this as it is over-taxing my brain and giving me migraines. I'm ready for my cup of cocoa. Just thinking out loud....

John Steffler

The Green Insect

John Steffler


I had a green insect, a kind that had never before been
----- seen,
descendant of an ancient nation, regal, rigid in ritual.


It would sun itself on my windowsill, stretching its legs
one by one, its hinged joints, its swivel joints, its
----- claws, unfolding and folding its Swiss army knife implements.
It was ready for a landing on the moon.


Around my page it marched itself like a colour guard.
It halted, and its segments fell into place, jolting all
------ down the line.


It uncased its wings which glistened the way sometimes very
------ old things glisten: tortoiseshell fans, black veils,
------ lantern glass.


It was a plant with a will, an independent plant, an early
------invention wiser than what we've arrived at now.
It was a brain coiled in amulets for whom nature is all
------hieroglyphs.


People gawked, and a woman pointed a camera, and I
-------hesitated, but -- I did -- I held the insect up by its
-------long back legs like a badge, like my accomplishment,
and the air flashed, and the insect twisted and fought,
-------breaking its legs in my fingertips, and hung


lunging, fettered with stems of grass,


and I laid it gently down on a clean page,
but it wanted no convalescence,


it ripped up reality, it flung away time and space,


I couldn't believe the strength it had,


it unwound its history, ran out its spring in kicks and
------ rage, denied itself, denied me and my ownership,
------ fizzed, shrank, took off in wave after wave of murder,
------ and left nothing but this page faintly stained with
------ green.

Excerpt from a Letter to... an Old Poet?

"Read as little as possible of literary criticism - such things are either partisan opinions, which have become petrified and meaningless, hardened and empty of life, or else they are just clever word-games, in which one view wins today, and tomorrow the opposite view. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. ... - Always trust yourself and your own feeling, as opposed to argumentations, discussions, or introductions of that sort; if it turns out that you are wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will eventually guide you to other insights. Allow your judgments their own silent, undisturbed development, which, like all progress, must come from deep within and cannot be forced or hastened. Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating. "


---------------------------------------------------------Ranier Maria Rilke

The Letter

"...A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take the destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from outside. ..."

-----------------------------------------------------------------Rainer Maria Rilke

Grasshopper, Snatch the Pebble From my Hand...

"...You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. Now (since you have said you want my advice) I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you - no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. ..."

----------------------------------------------------------------Rainer Maria Rilke

Hook, Line & Sinker

Carmelita

Off the Cuff

I don't usually ad lib my posts - but there've been a few things on my mind lately that I'd like to share. I'm not sure whether this is going to be a rant or even where this is going. Bear with me. As some of you have noted - I have not, as of late, been "as engaged” with poetry as I've been in the past. Actually, I asked poetry to marry me. Bought a ring. Got down on one knee. She said yes, but jilted me at the altar. I'm kinda out there on the rebound - but I'll survive.

Then there's the fact that I've become rather disenchanted with this whole blogging spiel. I mean why should anybody give a crap that I post a poem or music clip or commentary or what you usually come across on poetry blogs: self-aggrandizement. There's enough hot air out in the blogosphere to fill the Hindenburg all over again and then some. Everybody is trying to sound so "deep" but all I keep hearing and reading out there are hollow words. Then when you actually find something on a blog that you want to comment on and do - God forbid if you disagree with the blogger. You're shunned like the proverbial plague. I don't do "brown-nosing" very well I'm afraid. If that means that I am destined to become a pariah in this literary community. So be it!

Strange, I thought that artists in the guise of poets and writers in general welcomed different perspectives. I was led to believe that they welcomed voices of dissent. Voices that were different from the common and that differed from their own. Voices that marched to the beat of a different drum. Is there no room for a poet that does not twist and pivot to the beat? Is there no room here for the stick which will not bend to the stream? Is there no place for a would-be poet that is not published? Must poets only be measured by the prizes and awards that they garner?

In 1901, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy were all overlooked by the judges who awarded the first Nobel Prize for literature to Sully Prudhomme. Anybody read any Prudhomme recently? Literary awards have become so enormously important to writers and publishers that as Ellen Seligman of McClelland & Stewart says, “If a book isn't on a list, there's a sense in which it doesn't exist." (Well I guess that my poetry does not exist then. It is a figment of my poetic imagination.)

There was a time when writers weren't obliged to take literary prizes seriously. They understood the politics, the bargaining, the subjectivity and the sheer dumb luck that invariably goes into these decisions. Today the writer seems (IMHO) to take these awards too seriously. Your work must win prizes or at the very least be on a short (even long will do in a pinch) list of also-rans.Well, I have made no such lists. And you won't likely be seeing my name bandied about by publishers as an "also-ran".

I write poetry: bad or good, it's all I've got. It gives me pleasure to write and sometimes even to read it. Apparently, it's also given a few readers some pause. That's enough for me. If that makes me irrelevant in the literary world or even in this on-line poetic community - well then that's fine too! Somehow I'd lost track of what this is really all about - the poetry. It doesn't matter if I publish it or not - what matters is that it communicates something - anything.

I'm stepping off the soap box before I get pushed off. Thanks.

I am the Walrus

Yes We Can

Don't Think Twice...It's All Right

It ain't no use in turning on your light, Babe -
That light I never knowed.
And it ain't no use in turning on your light, Babe -
I'm on the dark side of the road.
Still I wish there was something you would do or say
To try and make me change my mind and stay.
We never did too much talking anyway.
So don't think twice. It's all right.

Going Once ... Going Twice... Gone

Badfinger

Palin - somethin'

&

This from Wordsmith:

This week's theme: Words that appear to have been coined after the 2008 US presidential candidates.


Palinode

MEANING:
noun: A poem in which the author retracts something said in an earlier poem.


Ummm....................Sounds just about right!

Ball of Confusion

Poetry in Vitro - Vol 3, No. 11

Going...going...gone.........

Pablo Neruda

Nothing But Death

(by Pablo Neruda - translated by Robert Bly )

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.



--------------------------------------------------------------
Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems. (Robert Bly)
Beacon Press - 1993

Poetry That Sings

She's not a girl who misses much
Do do do do do do do do
She's well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand
Like a lizard on a window pane.

The man in the crowd with the multicoloured mirrors
On his hobnail boots
Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy working overtime
A soap impression of his wife which he ate
And donated to the national trust.





Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out,
It doesn't matter much to me.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.
Strawberry fields forever.

No one I think is in my tree, I mean it must be high or low.
That is you can't you know tune in but it's all right,
That is I think it's not too bad.
Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to strawberry fields.
Nothing is real and nothing to get hungabout.
Strawberry fields forever.

Autumn Colors in the Hood

Poetry by Committee Versus the "Run of the Mill" Unadulterated Variety

I think, [dear reader], that you know enough about my views vis a vis poetry that you realize that I’m in accordance with the statement: “Whenever we stop writing for and from the self, art stops”. But as I sit here I can't help but think that when I was involved in online poetry workshops and my poetry was influenced, if not consciously at least unconsciously, by my participation in said workshop - my poetry seemed to be very marketable. I had no problem publishing my poems. As I’ve drawn into myself- at least strictly from a literary perspective and written more and more to please myself - my poetry seems to have garnered less attention. I appreciate the fact that we ply a “sullen craft” but a little recognition goes a long way in lending credence to the belief that we are not deluding ourselves into believing that our work has merit outside of our own cognitive mindsets.

Question is how do we strike a balance between writing from and for the self and writing for the "perceived" reader? Is this balance possible or even worth persuing?

Weekend Vibes

Reelin' in The Years

Randall Jarrell

The House in the Woods
Randall Jarrell


At the back of the houses there is the wood.
While there is a leaf of summer left, the wood

Makes sounds I can put somewhere in my song,
Has paths I can walk, when I wake, to good

Or evil: to the cage, to the oven, to the House
In the Wood. It is a part of life, or of the story

We make of life. But after the last leaf,
The last light--for each year is leafless,

Each day lightless, at the last--the wood begins
Its serious existence: it has no path,

No house, no story; it resists comparison…
One clear, repeated, lapping gurgle, like a spoon

Or a glass breathing, is the brook,
The wood's fouled midnight water. If I walk into the wood

As far as I can walk, I come to my own door,
The door of the House in the Wood. It opens silently:

On the bed is something covered, something humped
Asleep there, awake there--but what? I do not know.

I look, I lie there, and yet I do not know.
How far out my great echoing clumsy limbs

Stretch, surrounded only by space! For time has struck,
All the clocks are stuck now, for how many lives,

On the same second. Numbed, wooden, motionless,
We are far under the surface of the night.

Nothing comes down so deep but sound: a car, freight cars,
A high soft droning, drawn out like a wire

Forever and ever--is this the sound that Bunyan heard
So that he thought his bowels would burst within him?--

Drift on, on, into nothing. Then someone screams
A scream like an old knife sharpened into nothing.

It is only a nightmare. No one wakes up, nothing happens,
Except there is gooseflesh over my whole body--

And that too, after a little while, is gone.
I lie here like a cut-off limb, the stump the limb has left…

Here at the bottom of the world, what was before the world
And will be after, holds me to its back

Breasts and rocks me: the oven is cold, the cage is empty,
In the House in the Wood, the witch and her child sleep.


----------------------------------------------

Two For Tuesday + 1 - For Good Measure

Hayden Carruth: 1921-2008

Emergency Haying

by Hayden Carruth


Coming home with the last load I ride standing
on the wagon tongue, behind the tractor
in hot exhaust, lank with sweat,

my arms strung
awkwardly along the hayrack, cruciform.
Almost 500 bales we've put up

this afternoon, Marshall and I.
And of course I think of another who hung
like this on another cross. My hands are torn

by baling twine, not nails, and my side is pierced
by my ulcer, not a lance. The acid in my throat
is only hayseed. Yet exhaustion and the way

my body hangs from twisted shoulders, suspended
on two points of pain in the rising
monoxide, recall that greater suffering.

Well, I change grip and the image
fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains
brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop,

but wet, always wet. Haying was long delayed.
Now is our last chance to bring in
the winter's feed, and Marshall needs help.

We mow, rake, bale, and draw the bales
to the barn, these late, half-green,
improperly cured bales; some weigh 150 pounds

or more, yet must be lugged by the twine
across the field, tossed on the load, and then
at the barn unloaded on the conveyor

and distributed in the loft. I help –
I, the desk-servant, word-worker –
and hold up my end pretty well too; but God,

the close of day, how I fall down then. My hands
are sore, they flinch when I light my pipe.
I think of those who have done slave labor,

less able and less well prepared than I.
Rose Marie in the rye fields of Saxony,
her father in the camps of Moldavia

and the Crimea, all clerks and housekeepers
herded to the gaunt fields of torture. Hands
too bloodied cannot bear

even the touch of air, even
the touch of love. I have a friend
whose grandmother cut cane with a machete

and cut and cut, until one day
she snicked her hand off and took it
and threw it grandly at the sky. Now

in September our New England mountains
under a clear sky for which we're thankful at last
begin to glow, maples, beeches, birches

in their first color. I look
beyond our famous hayfields to our famous hills,
to the notch where the sunset is beginning,

then in the other direction, eastward,
where a full new-risen moon like a pale
medallion hangs in a lavender cloud

beyond the barn. My eyes
sting with sweat and loveliness. And who
is the Christ now, who

if not I? It must be so. My strength
is legion. And I stand up high
on the wagon tongue in my whole bones to say

woe to you, watch out
you sons of bitches who would drive men and women
to the fields where they can only die.


--------------------------------------------
From Toward the Distant Islands: New & Selected Poems (2006) Copper Canyon Press.

The Not-So-Dynamic Duo

Autumn in Quebec

Tehila P. Eisenstat

Size: 18" x 24"

Medium: Acrylic

Rainer Maria Rilke

Autumn Day


Lord: it is time. The summer was immense.
Let thine shadows upon the sundials fall,
and unleash the winds upon the open fields.

Command the last fruits into fullness;
give them just two more ripe, southern days,
urge them into completion and press
the last bit of sweetness into the heavy wine.

He who has no house now, will no longer build.
He who is alone now, will remain alone,
will awake in the night, read, write long letters,
and will wander restlessly along the avenues,
back and forth, as the leaves begin to blow.

----------------------------------------

Wall Street Shuffle

Two For Tuesday - Guess Who?

Another NOD

Deja Vu All Over Again

• The old creative juices have not dried up - there never were any to begin with. I have been winging it all along. I have it on good authority.
• I have not given up on the prospect of publishing my poetry in the form of chapbooks etcetera - not by a long shot...
• If you're an editor & you have not received a submission from me...I just haven't gotten it out of the gate recently. Don't worry you'll have ample opportunity to tell me my poetry isn't quite right for your publication or any publication for that matter.
• I still love poetry and read it extensively. I'm just not blogging about it as much. Mea culpa!
• If you've stopped reading my blog...Then what the hell are you doing here!
• If you're wondering why you don't see me anymore on poetry workshops online critiquing...It's not because there isn't a will, it's because there isn't a way. My work/personal life has taken a front and center stance recently.
• If I haven't been posting comments on your blog as of late...count yourself lucky.
• If you think my poetry sucks big-time --- tell me. Go ahead---It'll probably spur me on to write better.
• If you consider my poetry as not being marketable and think that I'm gonna stop writing any time soon...think again!
• I will not brown-nose in order to get my poetry published - I'm still idealistic enough to believe that it will get published on its own merit.
• If you find me offensive, pedantic and boorish...you ought to know that those are my better qualities.
• I don't have an M.F.A. - but that doesn't mean that I'm poetically illiterate.
• If you have anything constructive to say - I'm all ears...

Who Could Forget Him in - " Cat on a Hot Tin Roof " ?

Paul Newman: 1925 - 2008

Everything is Broken

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1928 & 1922 - Edwin Arlington Robinson

The House on the Hill
Edwin Arlington Robinson


They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around the sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.

Poets That Sing

From: The Boxer

I have squandered my resistance,
For a pocketful of mumbles, such are promises.






From: America

Let us be lovers we'll marry our fortunes together
I've got some real-estate here in my bag
So we bought a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner pies
And we walked off to look for America

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1954 - Theodore Roethke

The Storm
Theodore Roethke


1

Against the stone breakwater,
Only an ominous lapping,
While the wind whines overhead,
Coming down from the mountain,
Whistling between the arbors, the winding terraces;
A thin whine of wires, a rattling and flapping of leaves,
And the small street-lamp swinging and slamming against
the lamp pole.

Where have the people gone?
There is one light on the mountain.


2

Along the sea-wall, a steady sloshing of the swell,
The waves not yet high, but even,
Coming closer and closer upon each other;
A fine fume of rain driving in from the sea,
Riddling the sand, like a wide spray of buckshot,
The wind from the sea and the wind from the mountain contending,
Flicking the foam from the whitecaps straight upward into the darkness.

A time to go home!--
And a child's dirty shift billows upward out of an alley,
A cat runs from the wind as we do,
Between the whitening trees, up Santa Lucia,
Where the heavy door unlocks,
And our breath comes more easy,--
Then a crack of thunder, and the black rain runs over us, over
The flat-roofed houses, coming down in gusts, beating
The walls, the slatted windows, driving
The last watcher indoors, moving the cardplayers closer
To their cards, their anisette.


3

We creep to our bed, and its straw mattress.
We wait; we listen.
The storm lulls off, then redoubles,
Bending the trees half-way down to the ground,
Shaking loose the last wizened oranges in the orchard,
Flattening the limber carnations.

A spider eases himself down from a swaying light-bulb,
Running over the coverlet, down under the iron bedstead.
The bulb goes on and off, weakly.
Water roars into the cistern.

We lie closer on the gritty pillow,
Breathing heavily, hoping--
For the great last leap of the wave over the breakwater,
The flat boom on the beach of the towering sea-swell,
The sudden shudder as the jutting sea-cliff collapses,
And the hurricane drives the dead straw into the living pine-tree.

Two For Tuesday -

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER:1981 – James Schuyler

Korean Mums

beside me in this garden
are huge and daisy-like
(why not? are not
oxeye daisies a chrysanthemum?),
shrubby and thick-stalked,
the leaves pointing up
the stems from which
the flowers burst in
sunbursts. I love
this garden in all its moods,
even under its winter coat
of salt hay, or now,
in October, more than
half gone over: here
a rose, there a clump
of aconite. This morning
one of the dogs killed
a barn owl. Bob saw
it happen, tried to
intervene. The airedale
snapped its neck and left
it lying. Now the bird
lies buried by an apple
tree. Last evening
from the table we saw
the owl, huge in the dusk,
circling the field
on owl-silent wings.
The first one ever seen
here: now it's gone,
a dream you just remember.

The dogs are barking. In
the studio music plays
and Bob and Darragh paint.
I sit scribbling in a little
notebook at a garden table,
too hot in a heavy shirt
in the mid-October sun
into which the Korean mums
all face. There is a
dull book with me,
an apple core, cigarettes,
an ashtray. Behind me
the rue I gave Bob
flourishes. Light on leaves,
so much to see, and
all I really see is that
owl, its bulk troubling
the twilight. I'll
soon forget it: what
is there I have not forgot?
Or one day will forget:
this garden, the breeze
in stillness, even
the words, Korean mums.


-----------------------------------

Got the Picture - Part II...

Got the Picture?

------------------------------------------------------------

I took over 1500 holiday pics - here are a select few that caught my eye.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1946: Karl Shapiro

Elegy For A Dead Soldier
By Karl Shapiro

The time to mourn is short that best becomes
The military dead.
We lift and fold the flag,
Lay bare the coffin with its written tag,
And march away.
Behind, four others wait
To lift the box, the heaviest of loads.
The anesthetic afternoon benumbs,
Sickens our senses, forces back our talk.
We know that others on tomorrows roads
Will fall, ourselves perhaps, the man beside,
Over the world the threatened, all who walk:
And could we mark the grave of him who died
We could write this beneath his name and date:
EPITAPH
Underneath this wooden cross there lies
A Christian killed in battle.
You who read,
Remember that this stranger died in pain;
And passing here, if you can lift your eyes
Upon a peace kept by human creed,
Know that one soldier has not died in vain.

-------------------------------------------
To the Canadian soldiers who recently lost their lives in Afghanistan

Feeling Mellow & Chillin'....

Getting Around the Block

Robert Peake has a great post on getting Back On The Writing Wagon . He posits:

"For me, poetry is like this. Usually, when I find myself wanting to work very hard, it is because I have not been writing consistently. ...The art of not pushing, but rather focusing on consistency, is alien to our fast-food culture. And yet, writing something daily is actually a form of instant gratification as well — a true and lasting gratification of actually having written, good or bad. It is also, ironically, good for one’s career. That is because publication and awards are a numbers game. And writing consistently produces a greater volume of higher quality work than an approach of fits and starts. At least, that has been my experience so far."

My response: What if you can’t tell what is of high quality and what isn’t anymore?

Robert: "Doesn’t that just go with being a poet, Nick? I’m there right now myself, beetling away toward this MFA manuscript, hearing other poets I respect tell me they think it’s good, convinced they must be temporarily insane; ..."

This brought up the argument - that it appears much easier to work in an MFA environment with the support of colleagues and professors. But what if you're on your own working without a safety net?

What if you a poet or writer that plies this sullen craft all on your own? How do you cope with periods of creative "self-wallowing" when everything you write seems hollow?

"The Self-Identification of the Second Generation Italian Immigrant:"

This was one of the working titles of my Master's Thesis. It grew out of a socio-psychological need to rationalize the sense of marginality that the second generation immigrant experiences vis a vis both the host and mother culture. Here was an entity that was a hybrid of sorts neither fully Italian nor fully Canadian. Neither fully integrated nor accepted by either culture. How much of this sense of marginality is self-imposed is a good question?

Certainly, one of the best litmus tests of the validity of this hypothesis is the trek back to one's roots. Embrace one's mother culture and see if she reciprocates. There have been numerous ethnographic studies on the remigration of immigrants to their points of origin. Most have concluded that the immigrant finds their mother culture changed. That coupled with the changes in the form of assimilation and acculturation that the immigrant must perforce experience in living and surviving within the confines of the host culture - make any idea that the move back should be like putting a fish back in its element problematic.

(yearly procession of the patron saint in San Donato di Ninea)

You Can't go Back


Each time that I go back to Calabria I get that sense of "otherness". The cultural enigma that is Calabria (or Italy for that matter) is like some joke that I should be getting but am at a loss to explain why it's supposed to be so funny. After conducting numerous interviews of SGIs (second generation immigrants) I realized that this was a common perception.


Was this latest trip back to my roots any different? Sadly no. There is still much that escapes me when faced with certain social phenomena. The Italian media is a good example. The Boob Tube is a prime example of this. It is, (at least) from my perspective unfathomable. It is a vast wasteland of cultural opportunity devoid of almost any redeemable properties. But then Berlusconi who is a media magnate & owner of the Mediaset conglomerate is indicative of some of the problems endemic to the state of this form of media.























But the Food is so Good

There is one fixed variable in the cultural equation. The fervor for homemade ethnic cuisine hardly ever wanes. Arguably the southern-Italian culinary palette is one of the healthiest. Still - engorging oneself on homemade bread and pastas do take their toll. I came back with about five pounds of extra baggage. Furthermore, the food here in Montreal seems tasteless in comparison.

Ah Those Vistas!

Telling it Like it is...

My hat goes off to Stacey Lynn Brown who discloses the potentially unethical nature of poetry contests. Obviously this kind of behaviour is unconscionable. The question is how often does this happen without anyone being the wiser? ... The full story here: A Cautionary Tale

After Conducting an Exhaustive Search:

I'm Baaaaaaack......................!

Just got back from a trip to Calabria. I had no access to a computer so you have been reading posts that I scheduled before leaving. Glad to see that many of you enjoyed the poems. Got some great pics and bumped into a couple of blog readers overseas. More later! Hope everyone had a great summer.

(P.S. - Pictured here after having a great meal at a friend's villa in Castrovillari. Thumbs up...cheers!)

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1990 - Charles Simic

Butcher Shop
by Charles Simic

Sometimes walking late at night
I stop before a closed butcher shop.
There is a single light in the store
Like the light in which the convict digs his tunnel.

An apron hangs on the hook:
The blood on it smeared into a map
Of the great continents of blood,
The great rivers and oceans of blood.

There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.

There's wooden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean--a river dried to its bed
Where I am fed,
Where deep in the night I hear a voice.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1967 - Anne Sexton

Wanting to Die
Anne Sexton

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1964 - Lewis Simpson

Working Late
Louis Simpson

A light is on in my father's study.
"Still up?" he says, and we are silent,
looking at the harbor lights,
listening to the surf
and the creak of coconut boughs.

He is working late on cases.
No impassioned speech! He argues from evidence,
actually pacing out and measuring,
while the fans revolving on the ceiling
winnow the true from the false.

Once he passed a brass curtain rod
through a head made out of plaster
and showed the jury the angle of fire--
where the murderer must have stood.
For years, all through my childhood,
if I opened a closet . . . bang!
There would be the dead man's head
with a black hole in the forehead.

All the arguing in the world
will not stay the moon.
She has come all the way from Russia
to gaze for a while in a mango tree
and light the wall of a veranda,
before resuming her interrupted journey
beyond the harbor and the lighthouse
at Port Royal, turning away
from land to the open sea.

Yet, nothing in nature changes, from that day to this,
she is still the mother of us all.
I can see the drifting offshore lights,
black posts where the pelicans brood.

And the light that used to shine
at night in my father's study
now shines as late in mine.

William Jay Smith

Epigrams


Critic

A short-order cook is the mealymouthed critic,
In his chromium kitchen long has he rambled;
Attacks an egg with a little egg beater
And serves it shirred, or blurred, or scrambled.

"Poet"

After,each,word,he,places,a,comma,
A,remarkable,effect,indeed,
It,gives,you,jitters,when,you,look,
It,gives,you,hiccoughs,when,you,read.

Lady Biographer

She devotes her life to the lives of others,
Sees the poor mad poets as they were;
And how they'd have been if they'd had nice mothers,
Or if they all had married her.


----------------------------------------
*Collected in Smith's POEMS, 1947-57
(Boston: Little Brown, 1957)

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1960 -William Snodgrass

April Inventory
W. D. Snodgrass

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1975 - Gary Snyder

Four Poems for Robin
Gary Snyder

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest

I slept under-----rhododendron
All night-----blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard
Feet stuck-----in my pack
Hands deep-----in my pockets
Barely able -----to -----sleep.
I remembered-----when we were in school
Sleeping together---in a big warm bed
We were----- the youngest lovers
When we broke up -----we were still nineteen
Now our---friends are married
You teach school back east
I dont mind----living this way
Green hills----the long blue beach
But sometimes ------sleeping in the open
I think back-----when I had you.

A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji

Last night watching the Pleiades,
Breath smoking in the moonlight,
Bitter memory like vomit
Choked my throat.
I unrolled a sleeping bag
On mats on the porch
Under thick autumn stars.
In dream you appeared
(Three times in nine years)
Wild, cold, and accusing.
I woke shamed and angry:
The pointless wars of the heart.
Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.
The first time I have
Ever seen them close.

December at Yase

You said, that October,
In the tall dry grass by the orchard
When you chose to be free,
"Again someday, maybe ten years."

After college I saw you
One time. You were strange.
And I was obsessed with a plan.

Now ten years and more have
Gone by: I've always known
where you were--
I might have gone to you
Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.

I didn't.
I thought I must make it alone. I
Have done that.

Only in dream, like this dawn,
Does the grave, awed intensity
Of our young love
Return to my mind, to my flesh.

We had what the others
All crave and seek for;
We left it behind at nineteen.

I feel ancient, as though I had
Lived many lives.
And may never now know
If I am a fool
Or have done what my
----- karma demands.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1953 - Wallace Stevens

Metaphors of a Magnifico
Wallace Stevens

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are twenty men crossing twenty bridges,
Into twenty villages,
Or one man
Crossing a single bridge into a village.

This is old song
That will not declare itself . . .

Twenty men crossing a bridge,
Into a village,
Are
Twenty men crossing a bridge
Into a village.

That will not declare itself
Yet is certain as meaning . . .

The boots of the men clump
On the boards of the bridge.
The first white wall of the village
Rises through fruit-trees.
Of what was it I was thinking?
So the meaning escapes.

The first white wall of the village . . .
The fruit-trees . . .

Mark Strand

The Remains

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.
I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.
At night I turn back the clocks;
I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.
I say my own name. I say goodbye.
The words follow each other downwind.
I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones
into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?
Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.
I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1992 - James Tate

SOMALI SHOPPING FOR ORGANIC FIGS
James Tate

I was walking out of the health food store
and into the parking lot when something powerful
and strange stopped me dead in my tracks. A woman
dressed from head to toe in a black veil, a bui-bui,
I believe it’s called in Arabic, stood stock-still,
alone, tall, only her eyes showing, but oh what eyes,
like bits of onyx set in virgin snow. A panther would
have been less shocking than this woman. Everyone
who saw her just stopped and stared. Normal manners
didn’t seem to apply to this situation. She was
the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, and yet,
I saw nothing but those eyes. Perhaps she was stricken
in terror. Children walked right up to her and stood
staring in awe. It felt like some tremendous mistake.
But maybe she was only dreaming, and we were dreaming
along with her. It was a cruel dream, the kind that
changes you forever, and waking from it was strictly
forbidden. Her bui-bui was made in Heaven, the blackest
corner of it.