"Chill October" - John Everett Millais - 1879

Some Pics From the B.Day Bash

With my wife Aurora.



With Aurora & a Crouching Elizabeth.



With Aurora & Carmen.

Yesterday It Was My Birthday

Over the hill but not too far away!

fourW18 Book Launch

The fourW18 Anthology book launch takes place on November 10th in Wagga Wagga & Sydney Australia on November 17th. Wish I could be there with you guys. Best of luck to Sandra Treble and the staff on the launch. Thanks for choosing my work to appear in this anthology. Cheers!

An Open Book

These are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in Librarything. The rules:Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk* to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your TBR list.


Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22*
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick*
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury tales
The Historian
A portrait of the artist as a young man
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world*
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula*
A clockwork orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels*
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A confederacy of dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye*
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance*
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood
White teeth
Treasure Island*
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


-------------------------------
Gee!... Who came up with this list? I can think of at least another 106 books which should be on the list.

The Futility of it All

I've just been reading the Futility Review and am amazed at all the fine poets that you will not be finding there. Apparently their rejection rate is 125%. With my luck I'll probably get accepted. .... Jeff Bahr has all the details here.

T.S. Eliot

La Figlia Che Piange

O quam te memorem Virgo ...


Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon's repose.


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

Trompes D'Oeil - David M. Lenz

Thanks to Brent Goodman for introducing me to Lenz's work.

All the Leaves are Brown...Yeah... Maybe!

Poetry in Vitro - Vol 3, No. 3

Interrupted Discourse Between a Father & Son

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

to be continued

Charles Simic

My Turn to Confess



A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,

That's me, dear reader!

They were about to kick me out of the library

But I warned them,

My master is invisible and all-powerful.

Still, they kept dragging me out by the tail.



In the park the birds spoke freely of their own vexations.

On a bench, I saw an old woman

Cutting her white curly hair with imaginary scissors

While staring into a small pocket mirror.

I didn’t say anything then,

But that night I lay slumped on the floor

Chewing on a pencil

Sighing from time to time

‘Growling, too, at something out there

I could not bring myself to name.

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

It's Still Life - Your's Truly - circa 1993

Oil on canvas
(18in. x 24in.)

This is What it's all About...Isn't it?

This is a reader's reaction on her blog to a poem: "A PILGRIMAGE TO L'ORIGNAL" (below) that was originally published in - July 2003 - in Thunder Sandwich # 21.

"This poem describes exactly my feelings on returning home from Japan to see my grandmother, who was so alive and vital when I left, lying in bed at 99, shrunken to a "changeling" who I could hardly recognize. When she was gone, I tried to spackle the space with my memories, but realized there were not enough to fill the large hole."

In response to your question - Have I written any other poems about my mother's failing health? Yes:


OSTEO - PARADIGM

In a world of perfect bones,
there is no room for hairline fractures,
hip replacements or herniated disks.
Prostheses are non-existent; bones
do not snap like bread sticks
or wear down like soapstone.

My mother can still squeeze my hand
till my knuckles run white and our thumbs
become one. She does not fixate on yellow
biohazards or aluminum walkers. She studies
how long the water will take
to course through irrigation ditches.

In a world of perfect bones,
long after cicadas turn silent
and the calabrian heat subsides,
my mother walks about
on that five foot high retaining wall
that separates her from her garden.


----------------------------------------
Published in: August 2004 - Stirring

Response to a Reader

In January 2003, my mother had a massive brain stroke. She was in Italy at the time, living at our villa in Calabria. In the spring of 2003, she returned to Canada and spent some time convalescing in a town in rural Ontario called Orignal. This poem relates the events of the first time that I visited her in Ontario and was witness to the ravages wrought by the stroke.


A PILGRIMAGE TO L'ORIGNAL

That he that is not busy being born
is busy dying.
------------------------------Bob Dylan



The last station to cross is the dirt road
that hits harder when the long drive
comes to a halt. You hate yourself
for begrudging her even this inconvenience.

The ranch house looks lost on the five-acres
of lawn that disappears into the undergrowth
and the bifocal eyes between the slats
of a shuttered window. "So you've come,"

a voice squeaks through the screen door
which reveals curator and medicus. She leads
you to a room with closed blinds; leaves
you with the changeling on the bed. You
could never have prepared for this.

The light tumbles into the room as you pull
up the blinds; turn to examine the face
of a homeless mind - translucent
and flaccid, blackened by pain.

She opens one good eye - greyer
than the clouds that spilt forgiveness
on you - and you are lost.


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

Castles

Wanna Come up and see Some of my Sketches?

Coiffeuse (1982)




















Self-Portrait (1991)



























Soak up the Sun (1999)

Two Men Playing Briscola Before the Fireplace (2004)

Some Well-Placed Words

Posted - Monday, September 03, 2007

Why Reginald Shepherd's Post Made Me Laugh & Cry at the Same Time

While reading Reginald Shepherd's post entitled: " Working Class Hero" I came across this passage.

"...as intellectuals and artists from poor backgrounds, people who as kids knew lots of words we couldn’t pronounce correctly, because we’d only read them in books."

It describes a socialization process that (although different) closely mirrors my own. The love affair that I had (and still have) with the English language drew me to the etiology of words and ultimately to the doorstep of poetics. Words became my sole weapon against an Italian culture that I tried so compulsively to distance myself from. There have been numerous sociological studies relating to the second generation immigrant, the denial of their mother culture & the process of assimilation within the host culture. Acquisition of language is perhaps one of the first, if not most important step in the process of acculturation. After all language & culture are so closely linked - that the mastery of a language along with the all important knowledge of its semantics & idiomatic expressions often renders an immigrant - homogeneous and in essence almost indiscernible from the host culture. This is the worst case scenario for a 2nd generation immigrant. The third generation: once it has received a modicum of social acceptability, often seeks out the original culture's nurturing teat.

As a second generation immigrant I self-consciously tried to gain the approval & approbation of this host culture. I saw my neighborhood friends & acquaintances (who I perceived had a flawed knowledge of the host language) as the enemies. Their stilted efforts at mimicking this language grated on my perception of what constituted an acceptable auditory pattern of this purloined language - that was English. I spent many hours listening to recordings of my voice trying to rectify stilted language. In my blind efforts & haste to be accepted I thought that I had received the ultimate compliment when during my undergraduate years at McGill University in Montreal - I was asked to play Macbeth in a staging of the play by a Shakespearean class (I had taken as an elective) and was told that I sounded like a young Ronald Colman (Prisoner of Zenda). Little did I know!

Despite my love & devotion to its nuances and the grammar of its expression - my love of poetics has gone by and large unrequited. It has not welcomed me open-armed within the ranks of its favored proponents. I still await the caress of an accepted manuscript - for example. I have not as yet been granted audience to read the borrowed words which best imitate my thought processes via poetic rhetoric. Despite my bending to a purloined culture I have nothing tangible to show for it. I still maintain a silent vigil.

Posted by Nick at 7:52 AM

3 comments:

Sheryl said...

Hang in there. Mine didn't get published until I had all but given up hope. Someone had to prod me to send it out that last time! I too can relate to this post as well as the other one.

1:18 PM, September 03, 2007

Nick said...

Thanks, Sheryl, for commiserating.

3:16 PM, September 03, 2007


Reginald Shepherd said...

Dear Nick,

Thanks for linking to my post. I completely understand and identify with what you write in your piece. Literature, literacy at all, was my shield against my surroundings in the Bronx ghetto, the black and Puerto Rican kids who threw rocks at me and stole my lunch money and just generally smacked me around because I didn't talk and walk like them, because I (supposedly) thought I was white; the Italian kids who threw vegetable crates on my head while calling out "Chocolate milk, chocolate milk"; even the snotty kids at the private schools I went to on scholarship. It was like learning a second language that no one else spoke, and that contained the secret words that would enable me to escape one day. Meanwhile, no one understand me but my mother (now dead), and even with her, the more her ambitions for me came true, the further apart we became, since her hope for me was that I would get to a different world than the one in which she grew up and the one in which she'd ended up.

And if you need encouragement, as I might have mentioned in my post, I sent out three hundred individual submission packets of four to six poems each before I had a single poem accepted anywhere. And it took me five years of non-stop submission (and revision) before my first book was accepted. I've now published five books of poetry and a poetry anthology, and I still get rejected more than I get accepted. So hang in there. Perseverance works, even if it works too damned slowly much of the time.

all best,
Reginald

5:55 PM, September 19, 2007

Quotes & Quotables

"Some folks lives roll easy
Some folks lives
Never roll at all
Oh, they just fall
They just fall"

------------------------------Paul Simon (from Still Crazy After all of These Years)

Margaret Atwood - Excerpt From "The Door"

STRING TAIL


I used to have helpfulness tacked onto me
like a fake string tail on a mangled dog.
Wag, wag, wag went my nerveless appendage:
If I give you something, will you like me?

Watch me make you happy!
Here's a dry stick for you!
I fetched it off the ash heap.
Here's a dead bird.
There! Aren't I good?

Here's a gnawed bone,
it's my own,
I took it out of my arm.
Here's my heart, in a little pile of vomit.

Was it my fault you were angered
by the world news? That you bad-mouthed God
and banking, and in addition the weather?
That you sulked all day and were vicious
to your mirror, and also
to the girls at checkout counters?
That you thought sex was a mess?

I did my best. Wag, wag
went my tail of string.
Have some drool and mud!
Admire my goodwill! It clings
to the soles of your boots
like soft pink melting jelly.
Here, take it with you!
Take everything, and then I'm free;
I can run away. I'm blameless.
You can have the string tail, too.



DUTIFUL


How did I get so dutiful? Was I always that way?
Going around as a child with a small broom and dustpan,
sweeping up dirt I didn't make,
or out into the yard with a stunted rake,
weeding the gardens of others
– the dirt blew back, the weeds flourished, despite my efforts –
and all the while with a frown of disapproval
for other people's fecklessness, and my own slavery.
I didn't perform these duties willingly.
I wanted to be on the river, or dancing,
but something had me by the back of the neck.
That's me too, years later, a purple-eyed wreck,
because whatever had to be finished wasn't, and I stayed late,
grumpy as a snake, on too much coffee,
and further on still, those groups composed of mutterings
and scoldings, and the set-piece exhortation:
Somebody ought to do something!
That was my hand shooting up.

But I've resigned. I've ditched the grip of my echo.
I've decided to wear sunglasses, and a necklace
adorned with the gold word no,
and eat flowers I didn't grow.
Still, why do I feel so responsible
for the wailing from shattered houses,
for birth defects and unjust wars,
and the soft, unbearable sadness
filtering down from distant stars?


--------------------------------------------------
The Door by Margaret Atwood - 2007. McClelland & Stewart.

This Forgotten Spot

I have no right to complain. Up until now I have had a good run with this venue. It has afforded me more than I had expected. I have made good online friends: people who I would probably befriend in real time. But I have lost the knack to have the fair reader speak their mind. And yet the followers keep following and the swallows keep swallowing.

That is to say that the readership is still there. It is just that I hear my own thoughts reverberating. This home has gotten perceptibly colder. Can someone help me find the way back? I need to want to read the words. I need to want to see them in print. I need to want them to matter. Help me find this forgotten spot where all seems in sync.

NōD is back!

NōD, the University of Calgary's undergraduate-run magazine comes back to campus this fall for its third year of publication.

A venue for emerging artists and established ones alike, NōD is a professional journal that showcases creative work of beginning writers and undergraduates alongside that of practicing artists. NōD magazine intersects creative communities in the literary and visual arts, inviting innovative creative endeavors.

NōD magazine is currently accepting submissions for our seventh issue.

Spread the word!


OPEN CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

Deadline: October 31st 2007

Submission Guidelines: Prose, poetry and visual art of all sorts, we want it all.

All submissions must either be in or easily transferable to digital format.

Ideally, submissions are 4-8 pages in length (1500 word max for prose pieces)

We look forward to hearing from you!


Ian Kinney,
Editor, NōD



Address:

NōD Magazine
c/o Dep't of English, University of Calgary
2500 University Drive N.W.
Calgary, AB
T2T 1N4

Email: nodmagazine@gmail.com

Website: www.myspace.com/nodmagazine

Quick Someone Light a Match

"... there are a lot of bad poets in thrall to Bukowski - after all, his great skill lay in making the writing of great poetry seem easy. Poets who affect his lifestyle without learning the craft of writing do so at their peril. And don't look to the man himself for clues on where the poems come from: he once said that writing a poem is ""like taking a shit, you smell it and then flush it away ... writing is all about leaving behind as much a stink as possible". "

From: Don't blame Bukowski for bad poetry - by Tony O'Neill

Doors to...

Piazza With a View

Why Reginald Shepherd's Post Made Me Laugh & Cry at the Same Time

While reading Reginald Shepherd's post entitled: " Working Class Hero" I came across this passage.

"...as intellectuals and artists from poor backgrounds, people who as kids knew lots of words we couldn’t pronounce correctly, because we’d only read them in books."

It describes a socialization process that (although different) closely mirrors my own. The love affair that I had (and still have) with the English language drew me to the etiology of words and ultimately to the doorstep of poetics. Words became my sole weapon against an Italian culture that I tried so compulsively to distance myself from. There have been numerous sociological studies relating to the second generation immigrant, the denial of their mother culture & the process of assimilation within the host culture. Acquisition of language is perhaps one of the first, if not most important step in the process of acculturation. After all language & culture are so closely linked - that the mastery of a language along with the all important knowledge of its semantics & idiomatic expressions often renders an immigrant - homogeneous and in essence almost indiscernible from the host culture. This is the worst case scenario for a 2nd generation immigrant. The third generation: once it has received a modicum of social acceptability, often seeks out the original culture's nurturing teat.

As a second generation immigrant I self-consciously tried to gain the approval & approbation of this host culture. I saw my neighborhood friends & acquaintances (who I perceived had a flawed knowledge of the host language) as the enemies. Their stilted efforts at mimicking this language grated on my perception of what constituted an acceptable auditory pattern of this purloined language - that was English. I spent many hours listening to recordings of my voice trying to rectify stilted language. In my blind efforts & haste to be accepted I thought that I had received the ultimate compliment when during my undergraduate years at McGill University in Montreal - I was asked to play Macbeth in a staging of the play by a Shakespearean class (I had taken as an elective) and was told that I sounded like a young Ronald Colman (Prisoner of Zenda). Little did I know!

Despite my love & devotion to its nuances and the grammar of its expression - my love of poetics has gone by and large unrequited. It has not welcomed me open-armed within the ranks of its favored proponents. I still await the caress of an accepted manuscript - for example. I have not as yet been granted audience to read the borrowed words which best imitate my thought processes via poetic rhetoric. Despite my bending to a purloined culture I have nothing tangible to show for it. I still maintain a silent vigil.

Quotes & Quotables

"As the John Lennon song ["Working Class Hero"] my title alludes to points out, they hate you if you’re clever, and they despise a fool. But I will be heard from. I’m determined not to leave the field to those born with spoons of various precious metals in their mouths. .... The culture I’ve acquired with so much work may be their birthright, but I appreciate it in a way that those who take it for granted rarely do. It means something to me—it means everything to me. Sometimes I stand in the poetry section of Barnes and Noble and wonder how many authors there come from backgrounds like mine. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand."

------------------------------------------------------------------------Reginald Shepherd


This just blew me away - that someone else had my exact same thoughts.

Labyrinthian Alleys

Poetry in Vitro: Vol. 2 , No. 12

Under Statement



This one's been out in the sun too long.

Don't Let the Sun go Down on me!

Coming Home to Some Good News - One of my Poems is Slated to Appear in "fourW eighteen"

Sandra Treble of FourW Press: a Charles Sturt University publication from New South Wales will be publishing one of my poems in their yearly print anthology. One of the launch dates of fourW eighteen (the title of the anthology) will be in Sydney (Australia) at Gleebooks on Saturday 17th - November 2007 at 2.30 pm. Wish I could make it.

I'm Back....You Don't Have to Look so Disappointed!

Arrivederci Baby! - A Ben Presto.

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

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

"Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble,

Ancient footprints are everywhere.

You can almost think that you're seeing double

On a cold, dark night on the Spanish stairs."

-------------------------------------------------------------Bob Dylan

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

We'll be taking off for Rome tomorrow. (Later on we'll be heading down to Calabria.) We've been looking forward to this trip to Italy. I'm leaving a couple of "literary pots" on the back burner. Hope that they simmer just right. Be good to each other while I'm gone. I'll try to check in time permitting. Might just post something too if I get the gumption. Otherwise I'll see you in a while. Ciao.

So - You Think You Can Tell?

How Cool is This?

Valparaiso Poetry Review's editor Edward Byrne announced his nominees for “Best of the Net” anthology and I'm on the list along with: Anne Haines, Michelle Bitting, Diane Lockward, Jared Carter & Frannie Lindsay. Congrats to these nominees. My thanks to Edward Byrne for including me among these fine poets.

When Rome Awaits

WHAT HE THOUGHT
by Heather McHugh


We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. "What does mean this 'flat drink?' someone asked.
What is "cheap date?" (Nothing we said lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we


could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic--
and least poetic-- so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans


were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked


"What's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori


or the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth
is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty,


for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:


The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. "If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die


they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.


That is how they burned him.
That is how he died,
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry--


(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry


is what he thought, but did not say.


--------------------------------------------------------------
"What He Thought" is the first poem in Heather McHugh's collection of new and selected poems Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968 - 1993, published by Wesleyan/UPNE, 1994.

More Simic

Errata

Where it says snow
read teeth-marks of a virgin
Where it says knife read
you passed through my bones
like a police-whistle
Where it says table read horse
Where it says horse read my migrant's bundle
Apples are to remain apples
Each time a hat appears
think of Isaac Newton
reading the Old Testament
Remove all periods
They are scars made by words
I couldn't bring myself to say
Put a finger over each sunrise
it will blind you otherwise
That damn ant is still stirring
Will there be time left to list
all errors to replace
all hands guns owls plates
all cigars ponds woods and reach
that beer-bottle my greatest mistake
the word I allowed to be written
when I should have shouted
her name



Hotel Insomnia

I liked my little hole,
Its window facing a brick wall.
Next door there was a piano.
A few evenings a month
a crippled old man came to play
"My Blue Heaven."

Mostly, though, it was quiet.
Each room with its spider in heavy overcoat
Catching his fly with a web
Of cigarette smoke and revery.
So dark,
I could not see my face in the shaving mirror.

At 5 A.M. the sound of bare feet upstairs.
The "Gypsy" fortuneteller,
Whose storefront is on the corner,
Going to pee after a night of love.
Once, too, the sound of a child sobbing.
So near it was, I thought
For a moment, I was sobbing myself.


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

Charles Simic: to be Named the US's 15th Poet Laureate

I'm ecstatic to hear this propitious news. Simic has been and continues to be a poetic staple in these parts. His work continues to inspire and his poetic voice still resonates with this would-be poet.

Congrats, Mr. Simic.

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

The White Room

The obvious is difficult
To prove. Many prefer
The hidden. I did, too.
I listened to the trees.

They had a secret
Which they were about to
Make known to me--
And then didn't.

Summer came. Each tree
On my street had its own
Scheherazade. My nights
Were a part of their wild

Storytelling. We were
Entering dark houses,
Always more dark houses,
Hushed and abandoned.

There was someone with eyes closed
On the upper floors.
The fear of it, and the wonder,
Kept me sleepless.

The truth is bald and cold,
Said the woman
Who always wore white.
She didn't leave her room.

The sun pointed to one or two
Things that had survived
The long night intact.
The simplest things,

Difficult in their obviousness.
They made no noise.
It was the kind of day
People described as "perfect."

Gods disguising themselves
As black hairpins, a hand-mirror,
A comb with a tooth missing?
No! That wasn't it.

Just things as they are,
Unblinking, lying mute
In that bright light--
And the trees waiting for the night.

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

*source - Reuters

Poetry in Vitro: Vol. 2 , No. 11

This space is for hire.

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

Two For Tuesday

The incomparable Joni Mitchell

Since You asked

Who the Hell is Zelig?

"Zelig is a 1983 mockumentary movie written and directed by Woody Allen. ... The film is set in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The title character, Leonard Zelig (played by Woody Allen), is a man who has the ability to change his appearance to that of the people he is surrounded by. For example, if he is among doctors, he transforms into a doctor, if around overweight people, he quickly becomes heavy himself. Zelig is called the "human chameleon". He is first noticed at a party by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Dr. Eudora Fletcher (Mia Farrow) is a psychiatrist who wants to help this man with this strange disorder, when he is admitted to her hospital. With the use of hypnotic techniques, she discovers that Zelig aims for approval, so he changes to fit in. Dr. Fletcher's determination allows her to eventually cure Zelig, but not without complications; on the road to recovery, Zelig temporarily develops a personality which is intolerant of other people's opinions.

Zelig used a very innovative and distinctive method to create the mockumentary feeling of this movie. For the film, Allen took real newsreel footage from the 1920s and 30s and inserted himself and other actors into the footage via bluescreen technology. To provide an authentic look to his scenes, Allen and his cinematographer used numerous techniques, including the arduous task of locating some of the actual antique film cameras and lenses used during the eras depicted in the film, and even went so far as to simulate damage, such as crinkles and scratches, on the negatives to make the finished product look more like vintage footage. The virtually seamless blending of old and new footage is highly notable in the fact that this was achieved almost a decade before digital filmmaking technology..."

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*source Wikipedia

THE POET - written by Jo Overfield, illustrated by Liam Brazier

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From - Sundown Multimedia

A Pensive Poet on a Midsummer Night in a Garden: Kashmir, 1630

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Is there any other kind?

From Cover to Cover

Jeannine Hall Gailey Asks:

Which ten books are the books that have inspired the most writing from you? The books you read that you couldn't wait to put down so you could write afterwards? These aren't neccessarily your "favorite" books, but the books that have helped you generate the most new work. If you are a poet, they do not have to all be poetry, they can be fiction, non-fiction, etc.

-------------------------------------------------------------from Jeannine Hall Gailey's Blog


Cows, Pigs, Wars & Witches - Marvin Harris

1984 -George Orwell

Faust - Goethe

Selected Poems - T.S. Eliot

The Social Construction of Reality - Berger & Luckmann

The Island of Dr. Moreau - H.G. Wells

Almost Anything by Aldous Huxley (especially The Devils of Loudon & Brave New World)

The Time of Indifference - Alberto Moravia

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima

The Moon & Sixpence - W. Somerset Maugham




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I had to leave so many books off the list for lack of space -

Why Not Get Rejected by the Best?

Copper Canyon is the leading U.S. independent publisher of poetry. From its home in Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend, Wash., it publishes poetry by numerous Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winners, including Pablo Neruda, Ted Kooser, Maxine Kumin and W.S. Merwin and such leading American poets as Jim Harrison, Olga Broumas and Ruth Stone. Its books look attractive to the eye, feel solid in the hand and engage the mind.

---------------------------------------------------------Jeff Baker ( The Oregonian )

Thanks to Jilly for pointing me to this article.

I Have my Poetry to Protect me

Zelig's Other Complaint

Yesterday I received another manuscript rejection. (Publisher's justification: "I'm all booked up and am not taking any unsolicited manuscripts".) Now don't get me wrong I haven't really sent it out to too many places (maybe half a dozen) but each rejection hits closer to the heart. Perhaps it's because I see these rejection notices as a rebuff of my work in its entirety and by extension my poetic voice and vision. (Which may not be 20/20 like some poets - but is also not as myopic as others.) Each one of these notices takes me one step closer to throwing in the proverbial towel. Have I been deluding myself for the past five years in thinking that I had something pertinent to add to the already corpulent body of modern poetry?

The problem is that I have never walked away from anything in my life. A couple of years ago I had the same feeling (as today) when most of the poets that I knew had published in print. Some of those told me to pack it in and that I just didn't have the poetic acumen to get into a "real poetry journal". Still a poem that was much derided by them as vacuous was printed in a reputable magazine. (Of course this event, in and of itself, did not repudiate their claim. But I took it as a sign from the poetry gods.)... Yet, by and large, poetry keeps pointing me towards the emergency exit. And I keep thinking about Bukowski's poem, "so you want to be a writer? :

....don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you. ...

Now I'm thinking is this just indigestion or is "the sun inside me burning my gut"?

This is Where I'll be in August

Sandra Beasley will be recreating the NaPoWriMo experience in August. She asks other like-minded poets to join her. If you have the itch to write next month -- visit her blog and let her know. Unfortunately, in August I'll be here:



















More specifically here:


















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You can stop clapping now - April is just around the corner!

JANE HIRSHFIELD

The Opening



Every meeting is fateful.

A bot fly lays her yellow eggs on the leg of a horse.

A door latch slips into place
and the story once told behind it is over:

A sentence turns in mid-stride and
becomes a question.

No one knows why.

But mostly we keep on asking.
A sound like many small birds in a tree.
A sound like rain.

Once, in the long midsummer drought
of coastal California, I heard a sound that puzzled.
I went outside to stars,
my outstretched hand unwetted.

But from every tree around me, water came hard,
the downpour still at full in its falling.

The gutters made the sound they throat while working.
My hand was dry.

I stood inside the mystery,
no question in my heart's fast beating.


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first appeared in Margie -Volume 2, 2003

Two For Tuesday

Five Man Electrical Band – “Signs” & “Absolutely Right”

This One Still Blows my Mind

"Dante": Jean-Leon Gerome (1824-1904)

"I wept not, so to stone

within I grew."

--------------------------------------Dante Alighieri

Poetry by Design versus Poetry by Revelation

As you probably know, if you’ve visited this blog on more than one occasion I’m not a prolific poet, even at the best of creative times. In most instances - within the scope of the creative process – the poem strikes me like lightning – a flash of a phrase appears and then once the blinding effect fades (and my poetic eyes adjust to the light) the rest of the poem emerges as bits of a receding ship refusing to remain submerged.

Oddly enough, this is usually the rule rather than the exception. Of course there is always the editing (the lesser god of poetry) that must take its perfunctory course. But by and large poems coalesce almost immediately - emerging in full-bodied form from the outset.

So when I took on the NaPoWriMo challenge, I really was slitting my poetic wrists. To be perfectly honest with you I didn’t think that I was going to make it. But a month and about 30 terrible poems later I was still alive… poetically speaking. In retrospect it’s interesting to note that some decent tropes did surface. But it is difficult for me to write “poetry by design”. However, I know that most poets routinely planify the creative poetic process (i.e. for poetry collections, a series of poems etc...) .

In your experience does the poem that you create by design stack up favorably to the poem that comes to you via inspiration? Or is this, in effect, a moot question?

Two For Tuesday

Zelig's Complaint

Deborah Ager of 32 Poems asks: “ I “know” poet-bloggers in an odd way. I know a lot about them, yet we’ve not spent time directly communicating in most instances. We have not spent much time together in person.... Do people think they know me because they read my blog? Do they?“


To which I responded:

You ask an interesting question. No, I would not presume to think that I know you or anybody else for that matter that I have met on-line. Whereas meeting someone on-line facilitates discourse of a certain kind. Written symbolic interaction is not a sufficient condition to arrive at the conclusion that we know someone. Instinctively we need to engage in other forms of symbolic interaction to supplement the verbal. IMHO it is somewhat like attempting to watch a movie with only the audio & a blank screen. Perhaps adequate enough to get a gist of what the movie is about but not consummate enough to make any presumptions.

Every day I religiously go through my blog roll and click. I read about someone’s publishing news, personal crisis, and vacation or just about anything else they want - me - the reader to be privy to. How much of this is social exhibitionism? I’m not sure. This is the kind of information that you might share with a friend and/or close confidante. Certainly, these bloggers appear to have busy social lives and do not seem to lack camaraderie. I am perplexed as to why these bloggers of which I am - I suppose - part & parcel of and who are for the most part successful at what they do, feel the need to share (at times), some of their lives’ most intimate details with an audience - that they don’t really know.

They would appear to be seeking affirmation from like-minded individuals and yet many of the bloggers I read are part of a literary milieu. Would it not be more satisfying to receive recognition for their work from a more immediate source?

I, for example, am not part of the literary world per se. None of my (real-time) friends are poets, writers or editors for that matter. My sole window onto the literary vista that is poetry - is via the internet and the books I read of course. Would I like to be more a part of it? Yes, but with certain reservations. I have read from various sources and on various blogs about the numerous venues that serve as platforms for just this purpose. I would very much like to meet and socialize at these functions. It might certainly prove interesting to meet some of the poets that I have become acquainted with on-line. (Would they in “real life” match up to my conceptualizations of them?)

But by the same token I would not like to lose the objectivity (on the part of both parties) that my marginality affords me. If an editor who knows of me from my blog chooses to publish my work it is safe to assume they are doing so strictly on that basis alone. However, I'm not so naïve as to think that networking has not proven beneficial to the career of many an author. And so it goes...

If I may redirect the gist of this post, I’d like to ask the reader which blogger(s) they would like to meet in real-time and why?

Poetic Relativity

I cannot even bear to look at the smattering of poems that I wrote as an adolescent. The poetry that I wrote as a graduate student (in Sociology) contains, perhaps at best, a few choice lines, forms of comparison and transfers of meaning that I have haphazardly tried to incorporate in some of my present poetic work. ….Heck, even some of the stuff I wrote a few months ago (during NaPoWriMo) - I read and go …Huh???

I was over at Greg Rappleye’s blog only to read a preface to the posting of a poem as follows:

It's from my first collection, Holding Down the Earth (Skybooks, 1995). I wrote this book before getting my MFA. I think it's obvious that I had a lot to learn, but I still like the poem.

This may not be a seminal question, but do we as poets (and I loosely define myself as a poet here -- although certainly not with the poetic acumen of Greg Rappleye) ever look at our previous work and go: “I wouldn’t change a thing.” -- or are we forever possessed by a sense of misgiving vis a vis our efforts twice (or even once) removed?

Two For Tuesday

Cat Stevens