Pat Lowther

BEFORE THE WRECKER COMES

Before the wreckers come,

Uproot the lily

From the hard angle of earth

By the house.

Crouch by the latticed understairs

Rubbish and neglect

(The sudden lightning

Of sun

On your back

Between the opening

And shutting

Of the March-blown clothesline,

Rise and fall of the swift light

Like blows.)

Here a lifetime's

Slimy soapsuds

Curdle the earth,

In this corner

Under the stairs,

But have not killed

The woodbugs

Nor the moths' pupae

Which brush your fingers

As you dig

For the round, rich root,

The lily root

Which has somehow, senselessly,

Not been killed either

But has grown every year

An astonished babyhood,

An eye-struck Easter.

Pack it among the photographs,

The silver polish,

And the last laundry

Which will not again

Lift and shutter

For the shattering sun.

Mark its container: X

Two intersecting lines,

A lattice point

Of time

And the years' seasons.

Before the wreckers come,

Carry away

The lightning-bulb of sun.

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

From: Time Capsule, Polestar 1996, p.201.

RANDOM INTERVIEW


1, the fear

the fear is of everything
staying the way it is
and only i changing


the fear is
of everything changing
and i staying the same


the world expanding
branch tunnel cell
more and more
precious and terrible


while i grow only more
fragile and confused


the fear is my own
hands beating
like moths


my eyelids stuttering
light breaking into
meaningless phrases


the fear is of you
patiently elsewhere growing
a blood shape
of all my wishes


2, i am tired

i am tired of pain
i am tired of my own pain
i am tired of
the pain of others


i am tired of lives
unwinding like a roll
of bloody bandage
i shall roll up
the sky, pinch the sun


i go out to the cliff pours
of stars, the tall
volumes of stars


i go down
to the grains of soil
to bacteria
to viruses
to the neat mechanics of molecules


to escape the pain
to escape the pain


3, what i want


what i want is to be blessed
what i want is a cloak of air


the light entering my lungs
my love entering my body
the blessing descending
like the sky
sliding down the spectrum


what i want is to be
aware of the spaces between stars, to breathe
continuously the sources of sky,
a veined sail moving,
my love never setting
foot to the dark
anvil of earth


-----------------------------------------------------------
From: Time Capsule, Polestar :1996, p. 242


Pat Lowther, born in 1935 in British Columbia, was once described by fellow poet Anne Marriott as “a poet with an unusual power of perceiving and interpreting small things.” By the age of ten, Lowther was a published poet, her work having appeared in the Vancouver Sun. Her first collection, This Difficult Flowring, was published in 1968, and four more collections followed in the next nine years. In 1974, Lowther became the first chairwoman of the League of Canadian Poets. Lowther disappeared in 1975, and in 1977, her husband, Roy Lowther, was charged with her murder. Many of her fellow poets wrote tributes to Lowther on her death, including Elizabeth Brewster's “For Pat Lowther.” In 1980, the Pat Lowther Award was established by the League of Canadian Poets; this prize is awarded annually to a Canadian woman poet for a best new collection.

Eeeny, Meeny, Miney...MEME

Give us at least 10 quotations pertaining to poetry - from 10 different writers &/or poets which best coincide with your philosophy vis a vis ars poetica. They can be posthumous or otherwise. The order is not important - unless it is to you.



“Poetry is thoughts that breathe, and words that burn.”
---------------------------------------------------------- Thomas Gray.


“There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.”
----------------------------------------------------------- John Cage


"What a poet keeps out of a poem is as necessary to its success as what the poet lets into it."
----------------------------------------------------------- Mary Kinzie


"If we care about readers at all (and not just those in the academy), we have to give them a way into the poem. And I think that we need to remember that clarity does not preclude depth."
------------------------------------------------------------ Claudia Emerson

“Poetry is the power of defining the indefinable in terms of the unforgettable.”
----------------------------------------------------------- - Louis Untermeyer.


“To define what a poem is would require defining human existence. It would require answering why is there something, rather than nothing.”
------------------------------------------------------------- Charles Simic


“Poetry is a language pared down to its essentials.”
-------------------------------------------------------------- Ezra Pound.


"Times change and forms and their meanings alter. Thus new poems are necessary. Their forms must be discovered in the living language of their day, or old forms, embodying exploded concepts, will tyrannize over the imagination."
------------------------------------------------------------– William Carlos Williams.


“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
--------------------------------------------------------------- Robert Frost.


"You never ask a poet what he means, you tell him!"
----------------------------------------------------------------Howard Nemerov


I tag, Suzanne, Sam, Collin, Robert & Rachel.

By Any Other Name - Deuxieme Partie

Poetry isn't written from the idea down. It's written from the phrase, line and stanza up, which is different from what your teacher taught you to do in school.
----------------------------------------------------------------Margaret Atwood


But the lover's power is the poet's power. He can make love from all the common strings with which this world is strung.
---------------------------------------------------------------- Amelia Barr


I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us, the beauty of nature, the beauty of human beings.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Ella R. Bloor

Poetry; our way back to the most private of rooms.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Marianne Boruch


Poetry is life distilled.
----------------------------------------------------------------~Gwendolyn Brooks


Be yourself. Don't imitate other poets. You are as important as they are.
------------------------------------------------------------------Gwendolyn Brooks


The art which uses words as both speech and song to reveal the realities that the senses record, the feelings salute, the mind perceives, and the shaping imagination orders.
------------------------------------------------------------------Babettes Deutsch


To see the Summer Sky
Is Poetry, though never in a Book it lie -
True Poems flee.
-----------------------------------------------------------------~Emily Dickinson



Being Poet Laureate made me realize I was capable of a larger voice. There is a more public utterance I can make as a poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Rita Dove


Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful -
---------------------------------------------------------------------Rita Dove



I'm a poet and I've read a lot of Russian poetry and can hear It's sounds. Russian poetry is so important to an understanding of the culture.
----------------------------------------------------------------Helen Dunmore


Poetry is not always words.
----------------------------------------------------------------~Audrey Foris


They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Janet Frame



None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Edith Hamilton



Only the poet can look beyond the detail and see the whole picture.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Helen Hayes


I write first drafts with only the good angel on my shoulder, the voice that approves of everything I write. This voice does'nt ask questions like, "Is this good? Is this a poem? Are you a poet?" I keep this voice at a distance, letting only the good angel whisper to me: Trust yourself. You can't worry a poem into existence.
------------------------------------------------------------------Georgia Heard



Poetic language honors polarities. We use the language of poetry to provide the many levels of feeling, facets of knowing, simultaneously, so we can examine them and move forward.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Peggy Osna Heller


To me, poetry is a marriage of craft and imagination. The making of apoem requires attention to form, sound, revision, and precision. But imagination lifts you from a lawn chair to the clouds. And this is the mystery of poetry.
------------------------------------------------------------------Christine E. Hemp


...the art of saying everything and reducing it to nothing...
------------------------------------------------------------------Barbara Hyett


It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in [the] soul.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Sofia Kovalevskaya


Poetry allows one to speak with a power that is not granted by our culture.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Linda McCarriston


Poetry; Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Marianne Moore


Writing poems can be a way of pinning down a dream (almost); capturing amoment, a memory, a happening; and, at the same time, it's a way of sorting out your thoughts and feelings. Sometimes the words tell you what you didn't know you knew.
------------------------------------------------------------------Lillian Morrison


Every poet I know - although there may be some I don't know who lead very different lives, who maybe live in the country and don't teach - tends to be just like the rest of us: just really busy, really overcommitted.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Sharon Olds


Breathe-in experience,
breathe-out poetry.
-----------------------------------------------------------------~Muriel Rukeyser


A lot of people think they can write poetry, and many do, because they can figure out how to line up the words or make certain sounds rhyme or just imitate the other poets they've read. ...
-------------------------------------------------------------------Cynthia Rylant


One can't write for all readers. A poet cannot write for people who don't like poetry.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Nathalie Sarraute


The joy of poetry is that it will wait for you. Novels don't wait for you. Characters change. But poetry will wait.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Sonia Sanchez


With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Anne Sexton


The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Edith Sitwell


Poetry is the deification of reality.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Edith Sitwell


I don't create poetry, I create myself, for me my poems are a way to me.
-------------------------------------------------------------------~Edith Södergran


I think a poet, like a painter, should be a craftsperson.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Anne Stevenson


The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Simone Veil


American poetry, like American painting, is always personal with an emphasis on the individuality of the poet.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Diane Wakoski


I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, ....
---------------------------------------------------------------------Diane Wakoski


A rich poet from Harvard has no sense in his mind, except the aesthetic.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Beatrice Wood


The poet gives us his essence, ...
---------------------------------------------------------------------Virginia Woolf


Who shall measure the hat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and tangled in a woman's body?
----------------------------------------------------------------------Virginia Woolf


One good way to start writing poetry is to read all kinds of poetry: not just in order to imitate but to fill up your head with it, to absorb it, to make poetry an essential part of how you view the world.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Valerie Worth

By Any Other Name

No great poetry, of whatever kind, is conceivable unless the subject has become integrated with the poet's mind and mood.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Lascelles Abercrombie


Poetry is a succession of questions which the poet constantly poses.
------------------------------------------------------------------Vicente Aleixandre


As the poet said, 'Only God can make a tree,' probably because it's so hard to figure out how to get the bark on.
------------------------------------------------------------------Woody Allen


It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.
------------------------------------------------------------------W. H. Auden


Always be a poet, even in prose.
------------------------------------------------------------------Charles Baudelaire


There exist only three respectable beings: the priest, the warrior, the poet. To know, to kill, and to create.
-------------------------------------------------------------------Charles Baudelaire


I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Harold Bloom


In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Kenneth Branagh


For the poet the credo or doctrine is not the point of arrival but is, on the contrary, the point of departure for the metaphysical journey.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph Brodsky


Every individual ought to know at least one poet from cover to cover: if not as a guide through the world, then as a yardstick for the language.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Joseph Brodsky


God is the perfect poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Browning


You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
--------------------------------------------------------------------John Ciardi


The poet doesn't invent. He listens.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Jean Cocteau


The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Jean Cocteau


The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Jean Cocteau


To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Sidonie Gabrielle Colette


If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter very little - somebody who is obsessed by Making.
--------------------------------------------------------------------e. e. cummings


A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.
--------------------------------------------------------------------James Dickey


Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.
--------------------------------------------------------------------John Drinkwater


A poem is a naked person... Some people say that I am a poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Bob Dylan


I consider myself a poet first and a musician second. I live like a poet and I'll die like a poet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------Bob Dylan


As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug's game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------T. S. Eliot


To be a poet is a condition, not a profession.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Frost


A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Frost


Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Allen Ginsberg


A poet is a man who puts up a ladder to a star and climbs it while playing a violin.
---------------------------------------------------------------Edmond de Goncourt


There's not a good poet I know who has not at the beck and call of his memory a vast quantity of poetry that composes his mental library.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Anthony Hecht


The poet's expression of joy conceals his despair at not having found the reality of joy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- Max Jacob


A poet is a man who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times.
----------------------------------------------------------------------Randall Jarrell


My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------John Lennon


For sure I once thought of myself as the poet who would save the ordinary from oblivion.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Philip Levine


Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
------------------------------------------------------------------Thomas B. Macaulay


The poet does not know - often he will never know - whom he really writes for.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Eugenio Montale


The courage of the poet is to keep ajar the door that leads into madness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Christopher Morley


I've never read a political poem that's accomplished anything. Poetry makes things happen, but rarely what the poet wants.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Howard Nemerov


A subject for a great poet would be God's boredom after the seventh day of creation.
---------------------------------------------------------------------Friedrich Nietzsche


All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the truest poets must be truthful.
------------------------------------------------------------------------Wilfred Owen


Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal which the reader recognizes as his own.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Salvatore Quasimodo


Poetry is also the physical self of the poet, and it is impossible to separate the poet from his poetry.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Salvatore Quasimodo


A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------Salman Rushdie


The degree in which a poet's imagination dominates reality is, in the end, the exact measure of his importance and dignity.
----------------------------------------------------------------------George Santayana


Every good poet includes a critic, but the reverse is not true.
---------------------------------------------------------------------William Shenstone


The poet is a brother speaking to a brother of "a moment of their other lives"-a moment that had been buried beneath the dust of the busy world.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------Edith Sitwell


A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Wallace Stevens


The poet is the priest of the invisible.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------Wallace Stevens


The poet may be used as a barometer, but let us not forget that he is also part of the weather.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------Lionel Trilling


The poet is in command of his fantasy, while it is exactly the mark of the neurotic that he is possessed by his fantasy.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Lionel Trilling


A man is a poet if difficulties inherent in his art provide him with ideas; he is not a poet if they deprive him of ideas.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Valery

The poet is a madman lost in adventure.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Paul Verlaine

The poet is in the end probably more afraid of the dogmatist who wants to extract the message from the poem and throw the poem away than he is of the sentimentalist who says, "Oh, just let me enjoy the poem."
-------------------------------------------------------------------Robert Penn Warren


A poet dares be just so clear and no clearer... He unzips the veil from beauty, but does not remove it. A poet utterly clear is a trifle glaring.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------E. B. White


It is true that the poet does not directly address his neighbors; but he does address a great congress of persons who dwell at the back of his mind, a congress of all those who have taught him and whom he has admired; they constitute his ideal audience and his better self.
----------------------------------------------------------------------Richard Wilbur

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------Oscar Wilde


A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
-----------------------------------------------------------------Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Don Hong-Oai - Circa 2001

La Modiste Sur Champs Elysees - Jean Beraud

Want, Want, Want...Want Ad

Slightly worn & out of practice poet-slash-critic looking for workshop (online or realtime) or other like minded poets to hone craft. [Has been known to actually give useful critique.]

Look Who Turned up in the May 2007 Issue of Boxcar Poetry Review

This is not my testament
------------------------by Sam Rasnake


cough, moo, the ticking clock – wrenched
inventions of the real – a rolling pin’s rub,
drifts of pipe smoke, doors open then close.

Neutrality is blind. Either I am Jesus,
or I am not. And the dead woman will,
in fact, have a successful birthing –

the child will nurse her breast, will have
fat hands and shoulders, his feet will be soft,
always, even though the land is hard

and the field’s in need of a certain bruising.
Wind over this field has a simple theology:
grasses move this way or they do not move.

I watch from my window, but I prefer standing
in the middle of the field so the world becomes
a great bird, flying into its perfect bird-life.



------------------------------------------------
Sam Rasnake's poetry, widely published, has appeared in journals such as MiPOesias, Pebble Lake Review, Literal Latté, Snow Monkey, Siren, The Dead Mule, nycBigCityLit, and Three Candles. The author of Religions of the Blood (Pudding House) and Necessary Motions (Sow’s Ear Press), he also edits Blue Fifth Review, an online poetry journal (website)

Our Postman Only Rings Once - But It's Usually Worth Rushing to the Door

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

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

*Given half the chance I'll be posting some commentary. Let me enjoy the read first.

A Day in the Life

"I heard the news today, oh boy,

four thousand holes in Blackburn Lancashire,

and though the holes were rather small,

they had to count them all, "



--------------------------------------John Lennon

Maggie Taylor - "Life Goes On" - 2002

Bob Hicok: (I Can Relate)

O my pa-pa
by Bob Hicok


Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop.
They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs
and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff,
whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never,
or those that end, and he was silent as a carp,
or those with middles which, if you think
of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch
of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights
in the woods, they've read every word and noticed
that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex
and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello
from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs
is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like
"My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste
for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine."
They're not trying to make the poems better
so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook
or electrocution, as a group
they overcome their individual senilities,
their complete distaste for language, how cloying
it is, how like tears it can be, and remember
every mention of their long hours at the office
or how tired they were when they came home,
when they were dragged through the door
by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard
to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked,
not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball
of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man
with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence
was his presence, his present, the Cheerios,
the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees,
that they're the most intricate version of standing up,
who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know
that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy.
A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me,
and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling
on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared
as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted
the rocket cars, as if running away from them
to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers
wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did
start to say something, to form the words hey
or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun,
into the burning leave, and were gone
before it came to them that it was all right
to shout, that they should have knocked us down
with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified
by the distance men need in their love.


-------------------------------------------------------
*from POETRY - May 2007

Bob Hicok's poetry has appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and Poetry. He is the author of Animal Soul, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, He is also the author of The Legend of Light , which won the 1995 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was an ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year.

Quote:

Question: When you meet people at parties who don't know you and they ask you what you do, do you say "I'm a poet"? Why or why not?

Bob Hicok: Usually not. Often I'll say, I'm the idiot standing in front of you who has nothing to say, or, nice shoes, which is the equivalent but shorter. Faces do a funny little dance when you say you're a poet, unless you're telling another poet. It's almost like saying, I have eczema. I see no reason to elicit discomfort.

Do Not Adjust Your Sets

Can PTV (Poet TV) be Far Behind?

Forgetfulness - Billy Collins Animated Poetry

I Think But Am Not

“They Shoot Poets – Don’t They?” - turns two in blog years this month. That’s 10 in muse years and about several hundred posts later. I guess that the fact that I lasted this long means that I must be doing something right or am just too dense to realize that I’m dead in the water. My money is on the second alternative.

What have I learned in the last two years? Well it’s been a bumpy ride and I wanted to throw in the towel a couple of times. This was compounded (in the past year) by my wife’s health problems, my dad’s passing, some legal hassles pertaining to our family business & my own health issues. This period also saw me mired in the longest drought of my short career. You can stop clapping now - I’m outta the slump in a big way!

The experience, however, has not completely lived up to my own expectations. There are some things that I might have done differently. I.E.:


1- This is not (admittedly) a “Thinking-Person’s” blog. The tenor of my blog has veered away from its initial intent. My original premise was to make it less frivolous & more focused on poetics and the poets & poems which give me pause. Whereas, I am no MFA graduate, I have been told that I am adept at critique and literary commentary. Therefore, in keeping with the spirit with which the blog was conceived (and what in essence got me here) – I will attempt to get off my laurels (mainly because I have perceived that I have none to sit on) and post more literary commentary and reviews. (Send me your work if you want to humor me.)


2 - Except for the NaPoWriMo experience this past month – this blog has taken me away from my creative writing instead of contributing to it. I don’t quite understand the mechanics of this just yet – but somehow this is true. Instead of stimulating my creative drive it somehow derails my poetic impetus (believe me that can hurt). Reading and critiquing poetry are what got the old creative juices going in the past.


3 – I have become too caught up with the popularity of this blog. Somehow along the way this blog has become its own entity. It constantly hungers to be fed more and more outlandish posts. Instead of allowing me to receive pats on the back it has become more of a monkey on my back. You see I’m even referring to it in the third person – already!

4 – Ergo, the blog needs to undergo changes and this might well start with cosmetic surgery. I might change its proverbial skin so that I might feel better in my own.

Turn on, tune in or drop out!

Sam Javanrouh

* ink drops in water

daily dose of imagery

Best of Bill Knott?

DEATH

Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
They will place my hands like this.
It will look as though I am flying into myself.


(POEM) (CHICAGO) (1967)

If you remember this poem after reading it
Please go to Lincoln Park the corner of Dickens Street and sit
On the bench there where M. and I kissed one night for a few minutes
It was wonderful even if you forget


FAITH

People who get downon their knees to me
are the answer to my prayers.


WRONG

I wish to be misunderstood;
that is,
to be understood from your perspective.


ESCAPE PLAN

I examine
my skin

searching for
the pore

with EXIT
over it


MINOR POEM

The only response
to a child's grave is
to lie down before it and play dead


GOODBYE

If you are still alive when you read this,
close your eyes. I am
under their lids, growing black.


--------------------------------------------
* poems are reprinted from Bill Knott's site and posted as "READERS' FAVORITES: THE BEST POEMS OF BILL KNOTT". He also notes: " You have my thanks to please download, cutpaste and post, reprint whatever you like from this, or from any page on this blog."

Théodore Géricault, 1818–1819

The Raft of the Medusa
Oil on canvas
491 × 717 cm,
193.3 × 282.3 inches



















One of the paintings that captured my attention during my first visit at the Loeuvre.

I Have Been Meaning to Post This:

"As for elitism, poetry is about the least "elitist" artistic pursuit around: it requires no special equipment, no great monetary investment, and no special training that one can't provide oneself if one is disciplined and determined. It just demands the ability and willingness to read and write seriously and intensively and to think about what one reads and what one writes."

-------------------------------------------------------------Reginald Sheppard

Anna Journey

Walking Upright in a Field of Devils


Because billy goats rise to the height of a woman
and walk upright, I saw a field of devils

blue and vertical, horned in the moonlight, heat
lightning in their luminous beards. Because the static

of grackles crying from ball moss in mesquite
meant this could be Italy, though it was the black

fields caught between strip malls
flanking Houston.

It's true that Keats walked further and further
from England into Scotland, and the landscape grew

more grim with every step. Lakes shrunk to a slurp
in each cheek. It's also true

that ships from a distance bob as copper weather-cocks
over a thatch of cottages. True, the prickly pear

is a leper dropping its limbs in the field. What is untrue?
The shape of a lung filled like a trough

might press down on a man's stomach--
he'd write his lover: a bellyache

brief as a devil's beard.
In the field: goat-eyed and planetary,

something about to move, the half-bloomed moon,
a pecked-out tea rose. The sun still hours away

in another century -- morning stalling its laudanum
eyes over a field, a death bed. Bodiless.

Then the rise

-----------------------------------------------------
* originally appeared in Shenandoah Vol 56, No. 3 , 2006

Anna Journey teaches creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she also serves as a contributing editor for the online journal Blackbird. She was the recipient of the 2005 Wabash Prize for Poetry as well as an Academy of American Poets' Prize, and her work as also been featured in FIELD, Gulf Coast and Best New Poets 2006.

Jiri Kolar, (1914-2002)

L'arc de triomphe - 1959

Collage on paper

20.8 x 27.2 cm

Dis & Dat

The 2007 Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere.........is Amy King . Kudos to her. Yours truly ended up in 11th place - which seems just about right considering the caliber of my fellow candidates. Thanks to those of you that voted for me & all the other worthy poets.



NaPoWriMo - I discovered that, when under timeline constraints I couldn't write myself out of a paper bag. Some of the poems that I posted this month were downright abysmal. Still I had fun and broke out of a writer's block that had been going on for some time. Now the trick is to stop writing at the drop of a hat. ...Oops there goes another one.



Erin Bertram is this year's winner of Thorngate Road's Frank O'Hara Award Chapbook Competition! Past winners being: Brent Goodman, Aaron Smith, Stacey Waite, & Charles Jensen.



A sobering thought from Suzanne's blog: "If the bee disappeared off the surface of the globe then man would only have four years of life left. No more bees, no more pollination, no more plants, no more animals, no more man."


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

NaPoWriMo - - Roundup

Day 1. The Song Remains the Same
Day 2. To the Woman Crossing on a Red Light
Day 3. The Changeling
Day 4. Losing My Voice
Day 5. Real Men Don't Write Poetry
Day 6. NaPoMo Blues
Day 7. NaPoMo Blues #7
Day 8. Rather Than Bleat
Day 9. A War of Attrition
Day 10. When Poetry Came
Day 11. Do Zombies Sleep?
Day 12. Do Zombies Fall Asleep by Counting Sheep?
Day 13. Poem Pimp
Day 14. Patellar Reflex
Day 15. The Voice I do Not Have
Day 16. DUD
Day 17. This is a Non-Poem
Day 18. Talking ‘Bout my MSN Generation
Day 19. Do Zombies Read Their Own Obituaries?
Day 20. La Morte Des Expos
Day 21. Peccatore
Day 22. Untitled
Day 23. NaPoMo Blues #23
Day 24. NaPoMo Blues #24
Day 25. Presently Untitled
Day 26. Of Patron Saints And Cobblestones
Day 27. One Hundred Elvises And a Gadfly
Day 28. 3 Haikus #28
Day 29. 3 Haikus #29
Day 30. 3 Haikus #30

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* Don't tick me off or I'll post them all over again!

"Claude Monet Painting in His Garden at Argenteuil" - 1873 by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

NaPoWriMo: # 26 - I've Come This Far Haven't I?

OF PATRON SAINTS AND COBBLESTONES

Bill Knott Speaks Out

This was posted today over at Bill Knott's

"VOTE FOR ME

*please go to this website and vote for me to be blog
laureate: BloggingPoet.com

i'm not on the roster of nominees, so post a vote for me as a write-in candidate . . .

by definition only a blog poet can be blog laureate, and none of the current nominees are blog poets . . .

none of the nominees listed on the ballot are eligible for the post, because they're not blog poets . . .

they're not blog poets because they don't publish their poetry on their blogs . . .

i may not be worthy of bloglaureatehood, but at least i publish my poetry on my blog, which ergo makes me a blog poet . . .

you can't be a blog poet if you don't publish your poetry on your blog . . .

that's a fact, and no ad hominem aspersions of me will change it . . ."



Posted on BloggingPoet.com on 4/23/2007 at 4:22 by Anonymous

do they publish their poetry on their blogs? all of it? i have posted all of mine on my blog, or am in the process of doing it . . . I've posted hundreds of poems from over forty years of writing poetry . . . have any of these nominees published to the same degree on their blogs? how can you be a blog poet if you don't publish your poetry (all of it) on your blog??? most of your nominees are dead tree poets, not blog poets


Posted on 4/23/2007 at 4:30 by Anonymous

oops forget to add my name to the comment above: Bill Knott

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

Dear Bill,

I respect the fact that you have published and continue to publish your poetry on your Blog. Disseminating your poetry for public consumption is commendable and certainly (in my opinion) adheres to the spirit of the medium. I must also admit that I enjoy reading the poetry on your blog. That you have not been nominated for this honor is unfortunate. But I don't see how denigrating those that have been nominated - thus belittling the process and title changes that fact.

I do not believe that I belong on such a list of poets or that there is any danger, any time soon, of me being elected Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. I am sure that whomever is elected will be a much worthier candidate than myself. I am relatively new to the PoBiz and am neither an MFA student nor educator in creative writing. I am not a "dead tree poet" in that I have not been published, although the thought that I should be has crossed my mind on several occasions. I publish most, if not all, my poetry on my blog in a series of posts that I call "Poems in Vitro".

Someone on an on-line poetry workshop once informed me that I was a much better critic of the literary genre than practitioner and that I would never amount to anything as a poet. I am, I hope, in the process of proving that assertion to be fallacious.

Finally, while I may not agree with your contention, I believe you have every right to voice your opinion. However, I do not understand how deriding this ethernet election, which only appears to spotlight the poet online and furthers "Poetry" (in this relatively new medium) can coincide with your obvious love for and devotion to Ars Poetica.


Best Regards
Nick Bruno

I'm in a Jean Beraud State of Mind

Les Grands Boulevards - Le Theatre Des Varietes

NaPoWriMo: # 23 & #24

#23


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#24

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*just some random thoughts scribbled down - running on empty here in MTL.!

Lay a Little Lovin' on me

2007 Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere Voting Begins

Listed below are the eligible candidates for the 3rd annual Poet Laureate Of The Blogosphere election. Previous winners are Jilly Dybka & Ron Silliman. Nominations and rules may be found here.



The Poets:

Bob Hazelton of AveragePoet.com

Steven Schroeder of poetry, philosophy, poetics...

Laurel K Dodge of Possum

Michael Parker of Michael Parker's Journal

Collin Kelley of Collin Kelley

Alex Gildzen of Arroyo Chamisa

Sherry Chandler of SherryChandler.com

Sam Rasnake of sam of the ten thousand things

Levari of Night Book

Sandra Beasley of Chicks Dig Poetry

Kasey Silem Mohammad of Lime Tree

Rebbecca Loudon of Radish King

Rob Mackenzie of Surroundings

Helen Losse of Windows Toward the World

Pris Campbell of Songs To A Midnight Sky

Amy King of AmyKing.org

Lorna Dee Cervantes of Lorna Dee Cervantes

Nick Bruno of They Shoot Poets - Don't They?

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

Thanks to Billy the Blogging Poet for setting this all up.

NaPoWriMo Update - For Those of You Keeping Score

Day 1. The Song Remains the Same

Day 2. To the Woman Crossing on a Red Light

Day 3. The Changeling

Day 4. Losing My Voice

Day 5. Real Men Don't Write Poetry

Day 6. NaPoMo Blues

Day 7. NaPoMo Blues #7

Day 8. Rather Than Bleat

Day 9. A War of Attrition

Day 10. When Poetry Came

Day 11. Do Zombies Sleep?

Day 12. Do Zombies Fall Asleep by Counting Sheep?

Day 13. Poem Pimp

Day 14. Patellar Reflex

Day 15. The Voice I do Not Have

Day 16. DUD

Day 17. This is a Non-Poem

Day 18. Talking ‘Bout my MSN Generation

Day 19. Do Zombies Read Their Own Obituaries?

Day 20. La Morte Des Expos


------------------------------------------------
* If you missed any of these consider yourself lucky

Montreal - Spring Has Sprung - Again!

I.O.U.

NaPoWriMo #19

Tagged by Sam

Here’s the tag: Five poetry collections you may not have read but certainly must:

Richard Hugo, “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir”
Thomas Lux, “Selected Poems”
Dan Pagis, “Variable Directions: The Selected Poems of Dan Pagis”
Sharon Olds, “The Dead and the Living“
Yehuda Amichai, “Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai”


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The collections, for whatever reason, should be a bit off the beaten path. And need not have caused the earth to open and swallow you whole.

I'm not sure how far "off the beaten path" these collections are, but at least they're not on the main thoroughfare.

*If you haven't been tagged and you're on my blog-roll consider yourself tagged

NaPoWriMo - Day 18 - #18

Talking ‘Bout my MSN Generation


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

I'd Walk a Mile for a Camel

Man and Camel
by Mark Strand

On the eve of my fortieth birthday
I sat on the porch having a smoke
when out of the blue a man and a camel
happened by. Neither uttered a sound
at first, but as they drifted up the street
and out of town the two of them began to sing.
Yet what they sang is still a mystery to me-
the words were indistinct and the tune
too ornamental to recall. Into the desert
they went and as they went their voices
rose as one above the sifting sound
of windblown sand. The wonder of their singing,
its elusive blend of man and camel, seemed
an ideal image for all uncommon couples.
Was this the night that I had waited for
so long? I wanted to believe it was,
but just as they were vanishing, the man
and camel ceased to sing, and galloped
back to town. They stood before my porch,
staring up at me with beady eyes, and said:
"You ruined it. You ruined it forever."


--------------------------------------------
Excerpt from MAN AND CAMEL. © 2006 by Mark Strand.
Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

Edward Byrne on Strand's "Man And Camel":

"The title poem fits into the first section as a typical surrealist piece in which humor and absurdity are employed for effect and the poem closes with a final phrase or sentence akin to a punch line. In this poem a speaker who pauses to smoke a cigarette on his porch is approached by a man and a camel. ... On occasions like this, Strand seems to suggest readers should enjoy imagined art for what it presents rather than analyzing for underlying layers of messages or self-fulfillment. Nevertheless, an irony presents itself, as no poet’s poems invite such scrutiny any more than Mark Strand’s surrealist lyrics. Yet, Strand’s comical and self-mocking poems, whether they are funny fables or bizarre vignettes, frequently seem to me the least engaging upon repeated readings, sounding almost like old jokes told a second time. Even the elliptical phrases from the first section that at times appear reminiscent of Wallace Stevens’s poetry do not linger as long or as well as the more meditative and introspective monologues later in the collection might. In fact, one wishes this volume’s title instead spotlighted an example of the more substantial poems from the last two sections of the book."

2007 Pulitzer Prize For Poetry

'Native Guard,' by Natasha Trethewey


In her introduction to Trethewey's book "Domestic Work," Rita Dove said, "Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts." (poets.org)


Letter Home
by Natasha Trethewey


--New Orleans, November 1910

Four weeks have passed since I left, and still
I must write to you of no work. I've worn down
the soles and walked through the tightness
of my new shoes calling upon the merchants,
their offices bustling. All the while I kept thinking
my plain English and good writing would secure
for me some modest position Though I dress each day
in my best, hands covered with the lace gloves
you crocheted--no one needs a girl. How flat
the word sounds, and heavy. My purse thins.
I spend foolishly to make an appearance of quiet
industry, to mask the desperation that tightens
my throat. I sit watching--

though I pretend not to notice--the dark maids
ambling by with their white charges. Do I deceive
anyone? Were they to see my hands, brown
as your dear face, they'd know I'm not quite
what I pretend to be. I walk these streets
a white woman, or so I think, until I catch the eyes
of some stranger upon me, and I must lower mine,
a negress again. There are enough things here
to remind me who I am. Mules lumbering through
the crowded streets send me into reverie, their footfall
the sound of a pointer and chalk hitting the blackboard
at school, only louder. Then there are women, clicking
their tongues in conversation, carrying their loads
on their heads. Their husky voices, the wash pots
and irons of the laundresses call to me.

I thought not to do the work I once did, back bending
and domestic; my schooling a gift--even those half days
at picking time, listening to Miss J--. How
I'd come to know words, the recitations I practiced
to sound like her, lilting, my sentences curling up
or trailing off at the ends. I read my books until
I nearly broke their spines, and in the cotton field,
I repeated whole sections I'd learned by heart,
spelling each word in my head to make a picture
I could see, as well as a weight I could feel
in my mouth. So now, even as I write this
and think of you at home, Goodbye

is the waving map of your palm, is
a stone on my tongue.


--------------------------------------------
2002 by Natasha Trethewey - from Bellocq's Ophelia : Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.

NaPoWriMo - Day 16 - #16 - Still Hanging on

DUD

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

Jean Beraud - "Boulevard Des Capucines"

Claude Monet -
"Boulevard des Capucines "
1873
Oil on canvas

32 Poems - Vol 5 - Issue 1

The fact is that I have just read 32 Poems from cover to cover and marvelled at the diversity that I found between the aforementioned. Within I discovered what might easily be construed as snippets from the Theatre of the Absurd - a place where we all share the view that man is inhabiting a universe with which he is out of key. Its meaning is indecipherable and his place within it is without purpose. He is bewildered, troubled and obscurely threatened.


I.E.: Christian Nagle's - "Things My Father Taught Me"

4. "If it looks like it's going to hurt, leave early"

9. "People with a little power are extremely dangerous
----Belgian train conductors have a little power "

14. Certain people have deceitful hands.Type when you can.


Or: Daniel Nester's - "Queries"


"Don't loomers always appear from overhead?"

"Aren't all the horses in Hades, in fact, fiery?

"Can roadkill really fart--that is, be flatulent--after they're dead?"

"Isn't all gloom insufferable?"

"Aren't all shadows ominous to some degree?"

"The moon has always been pale, yes?"

Then within the same volume we feast on morsels of the secular:

I.e.: Joanne Diaz - "While Reading Ovid's Amores"

"...Perhaps//on a breezy day--I like to imagine
sometime in 1968--a reader left
this book on his couch to go
for a walk, and in his absence
his cat rubbed its ears against the pages"


Or - Robin Beth Schaer's - "Hollow"

You fill the closets and drawers, fold
and wait. In the pines between our homes,
your wife holds my ear against her belly;


And still in - Jane Springer's - "Boxes"

Inside that box there was nothing but a bit
of someone,
leftover.


But it is in the poetry that reveals the speaker as fragile and broken down to their inner core that speaks the loudest to this reader:


I.e.: Kelly Madigan Erlandson's: " Rarely Have We Seen a Person Fail"


"I have not come to sobriety
of my own accord, and no one does. The alchemy failed
Weary of medicating the problem
with larger and larger doses of the problem, even I
could see the futility. ..."


or Marianne Kunkel's: "Where to Look"

"Lately I have been looking for myself //in everything.
...I sort out the old glasses in my kitchen,
keeping only those which,
unclouded, reflect my face in them."

In the end, for this humble reader the piece by Lucas Howell entitled, " We Are Not In This Together" was, in and of itself, well worth the price of admission:

You take a pinch of earth in your mouth
and though it's what you're made of

the grit is strange between your teeth--
you think, It tastes of salt from long dead seas.

But this field is the beast's pantry, stocked
with clover and sluggish, sunwarmed prey.

When you find this place, the wind
feels like wind against your skin,

and the sky arcs down over a world
you know is just like this, and the word

you want to use is forever--
but you know that isn't true.

You've seen the hoofprint glyphs
in draws where deer bed down.

You're still the only animal that needs
a word for home.

If one were to measure this poem's success ( and this issue of 32 Poems) according to Mary Kinzie's proviso: "What a poet [and editor] keeps out of a poem [issue] is as necessary to its success as what the poet [editor] lets into it.", then this poem and journal appear to have succeeded in fulfilling their purposes.

Kurt Vonnegut: 1922 - 2007

NaPoWriMo - Day Eleven - # 11

Do Zombies Sleep?

--------------------------------
*second course to follow

Still in Winter's Grasp

NaPoWriMo - Day Eight - Easter Sunday

I am taking a break (don't sound relieved just yet) but will hopefully be returning tomorrow with something. Have a happy holiday. I leave you with this from Knopf Poetry:


Psalm 176
by Stan Rice


When I am appalled
By colossal artifice
The sad word
Is my fellow laborer.
What would make you
Want to forsake miracles
You are too close to.
Why.
My eyes are lights
In an emergency alert
System. The radio static
Sounds like water
Left on in the kitchen.
Not real silence. I
Am better off not having
Lived in the age of
Miracles for I can
Believe in them.
-----------------Selah.


------------------------------
From: FALSE PROPHET - RandomHouse - 2003

"Ophelia" : J.W. Waterhouse

NaPoWriMo - Day Six - You Got Them... Smoke Them

NaPoMo Blues #7


-------------------------------
*Best I could do on short notice

NaPoWriMo - Day Five - No.6

Real Men Don't Write Poetry

------------------------------------
*Old title new words

NaPoWriMo - Day Four - At This Rate I Think I'll Need to Take Some Meds Before This Month is Over

Losing My Voice

need I say more

Have You Taken Your Meds Today?

NaPoWriMo - Day Three - This is Already Begining to Sound Like a Sentence

The Changeling


is no longer available

Knopf NaPoMo Poetry - W.S. DiPiero

The Hotel Room Mirror

But who was it, then, that made her so unhappy?
-Madame Bovary


A half-room, foreshortened even more
in the huge speckled armoire glass,
the distance chopped, uncrossable,
between your image and where I stood

twiddling the doorknob before I knew
my own key didn't fit, late night,
your interior so underlit
that bluer shadows oozed your forms.

Already too late, the door
breezed open where your back and thighs
twisted in the green-winged chair,
your body's light coiled, at rest.

Dressed, angled deeper in the surface,
your man pleaded, hands wide, as he flexed
sharp from the bed's protesting edge,
the sheets pinwheeled beneath his weight.

Your glance and his (haphazard,
stark and unconcerned) found mine
in the frame, waiting, though I stayed
invisible to myself, my stare

like your bold forms inhabiting
our depth of field, in the scuffed glass
transcribed. It was already still
too late to save you or be saved.


--------------------------------------
From Chinese Apples: New and Selected Poems
Written by W.S. Di Piero