And Now....Some Canadian Content - Neil Young

"It's better to burn out than to fade away."

.......................................Neil Young

Nine Through Twelve

You Begin
Margaret Atwood

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.


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

Acquainted With the Night
Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain --and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.


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


Chicago
Carl Sandburg

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job,
here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,

Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building,
breaking,
rebuilding,

Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with
white teeth,
Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young
man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has
never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under his wrist is the pulse,
and under his ribs the heart of the people,

Laughing!

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of
Youth, half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog
Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation.


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


Because We Are Not Taken Seriously
Stephen Dunn

Some night I wish they'd knock,
on my door, the government men,
looking for the poem of simple truths
recited and whispered among the people.
And when all I give them is silence
and my children are exiled
to the mountains, my wife forced
to renounce me in public,
I'll be the American poet
whose loneliness, finally, is relevant,
whose slightest movement
ripples cross-country.
And when the revolution frees me,
its leaders wanting me to become
"Poet of the Revolution," I'll refuse
and keep a list of their terrible reprisals
and all the dark things I love
which they will abolish.
With the ghost of Mandelstam
on one shoulder, Lorca on the other,
I'll write the next poem, the one
that will ask only to be believed
once it's in the air, singing.


-----------------------------------------
N.B.: I'll come back later and explain my choices

19th Century Macchiaioli Artist: Silvestro Lega

The Macchiaioli were a group of Italian painters from Tuscany, active in the second half of the nineteenth century, who, breaking with the antiquated conventions taught by the Italian academies of art, painted outdoors in order to capture natural light, shade, and colour. The Macchiaioli were forerunners of the Impressionists who, beginning in the 1860s, would pursue similar aims in France. One of the most notable artists of this movement was Silvestro Lega (8 December 1826 - 21 September 1895).

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

From top to bottom and left to right:

1. Le Rose Della Primavera

2. Un Dopo Pranzo (Il Pergolato): 1860

3. Ritrattto di Giueseppe Garabaldi: 1861

4. Autoritratto - 1859-1860

5. Il Canto di Uno Stornello: 1867

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

*source wikipedia

Live Long & Go See It

Some More Bad News

I missed the opportunity to take this workshop with a poet I admire:

THE MUSIC OF THE SENSES: MAKING YOUR POETRY VIVID

Workshop leader: Mary di Michele

How admirable!
to see lightning and not think
life is fleeting.
- Basho

Whether it’s a wildly imaginative simile, Roo Borson comparing the sunset to an armful of dying flamingoes or a plain yet penetrating image like Issa’s farmer pulling radishes pointing the way with a radish, imagery is at the heart of poetry. It is the single aspect of poetry that can easily be translated. It is the music of the senses. All our perceptions are communicated, indeed filtered, through language. But we stop seeing the particularity of things in all their colours and textures when words become overly familiar; we accept the grey carton without tasting the eggs. Poetry seeks to revitalize language and our senses by stripping away familiar associations with words and the things they point to. Basho, a 17th century Japanese poet said that a poem works through plainness and oddness; Russian theorists in the 20th century called it defamiliarization, making the commonplace seem strange or new; poets of disparate ages and cultures seem to agree that this essential tension between what we think we know and what is suddenly revealed is poetry’s way of illuminating existence, of seeing the world in new ways.

Imagery is what makes writing ‘vivid;’ it is cultivated by poets but serves prose writers too so a study of how it works, or a refresher course, is useful for all writers and at all levels. In this class we will examine how images work in poetry and in your poems. By closely reading the poems of great image-makers among classic and contemporary poets we will learn to identify what makes an image vivid and memorable. We will learn to spot and weed out common errors in writing like clichés and mixed or muddled images.

In our sessions participants will: 1) share and respond to each other’s work each week, 2) on occasion try some writing exercises, and 3) discuss poetics regularly. Questions about publication will be addressed at the last class. For the first meeting participants are asked to bring 12 copies of either a poem of their own or a poem by someone else with images that they would like to discuss.

For the sheer pleasure of reading it and because it also provides a useful anthology at the back, Kenneth Koch: "Making Your Own Days" is recommended reading.

Mary di Michele was born in Italy and raised in Canada. She is the author of two novels and eight books of poetry, including Luminous Emergencies, short-listed for the Trillium Prize and Debriefing the Rose, short-listed for the QWF's A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry. She teaches in the creative writing program at Concordia. Her latest book, Tenor of Love (2005), a novel, was published in Canada and the U.S. and translated into Serbian and Italian.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This would have fit the bill nicely for this poet gone AWOL!

Two For Tuesday on a Friday

Another Poem That Changed Things --

In 2002 I remember reading the work of an online poet that I admired in The Adirondack Review. I wanted very much to replicate the feat as I felt that their review (TAR) had some fine poetry. In the fall of 2003 they were kind enough to publish: "Place Du Canada", which I still feel is one of the better poems I have written. It's one of the few poems that I've penned which makes a political statement and espouses views which I still believe in. If any of you have read Mordechai Richler's now infamous (at least in these parts) article "O Quebec!" in the New Yorker: May 30, 1994 you might understand whereof I speak. Anyway "this is all she wrote":

PLACE DU CANADA

What might this town square have looked like
in another era - when this bench was not here;
its green slats supporting the weight of a culture

that we tried to bring with us, when we docked
at Pier 21, but could not fit in our suitcases
without handles. Now I sit in the mapled shade
and consider. Where would we have put it?

The plaque below the statuary is a reminder
that the Father's of Confederation had fought
for the sole possession of this land. When
Montreal fell during a revolutionary war,

Quebec's allegiances were for the taking,
but would not become another Cajun state -
the francophone roots showing through
the bleached bones of an English presence.

Our flag flutters above the tips of trees,
the red and white - minus the blue.


------------------------------------------
First published in the “Adirondack Review” – Fall 2003 Vol. V, No. 2

Segue Into an Explanation of Sorts

There is a good reason why I include this poem by Billy Collins. Collins made poetry accessible and fun. He made me realize that a poet didn't have to take themselves so seriously to be successful. Poetry need not be all "sullen craft". That there is room for self-deprecation and parody. In sharp contrast to the poetry heavies Collins came across sort of as the "Woody Allen" of poetry. Even his physical presence kind of reminded me of the comedic director. His sardonic wry humour is unmistakeable even in the way he entitles his poems i.e.: Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,I Pause To Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles ; I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of "Three Blind Mice"; & Another reason why I don't keep a gun in the house.

His poetry made me realize that I could incorporate my sense of humour (if you want to call it that) and still be considered a serious poet. Somehow, when I think about the term "serious poet" the term seems to be a walking contradiction. Poets seem to so serious that they're funny. I'll come back to this when I stop laughing...

Of Course There's Always Billy

Introduction to Poetry
Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

More Poems That Changed... - A Couple by Strand

Eating Poetry
Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.



Keeping Things Whole
Mark Strand

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

Yeah I Know... I Know...Whatever Happened to the Other 29 Poems That Changed my Life?

Poem Number Two

It isn't often that any piece of art really speaks to you. Check that -- not only speaks to you but swears at you in archaic languages. So when you come across anything that strums your inner being like a cello you had better take note. Such was the case when I encountered this poem back in my freshman year in highschool. Albeit I was no "lonely teenage broncing buck -- with a pink carnation and a pickup truck," I could easily connect with this poem:


From Childhood's Hour
Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then—in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent or the fountain,
From the red cliff or the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed my flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.




Poem Number Three


Somewhere in the fray of literary pursuit I came across another example of narrative poetry that made a mark on tabula rasa. Stuck (at the time) in the formal verse universe I took Byron to task by reading The Prisoner of Chillon. What follows is an excerpt and in particular a stanza which seemed to transcend (at least for this reader at that point in time) its literal implication:


XIV
It might be months, or years, or days -
I kept no count, I took no note -
I had no hope my eyes to raise,
And clear them of their dreary mote;
At last men came to set me free;
I ask'd not why, and reck'd not where;
It was at length the same to me,
Fetter'd or fetterless to be,
I learn'd to love despair.
And thus when they appear'd at last,
And all my bonds aside were cast,
These heavy walls to me had grown
A hermitage - and all my own!
And half I felt as they were come
To tear me from a second home:
With spiders I had friendship made,
And watch'd them in their sullen trade,
Had seen the mice by moonlight play,
And why should I feel less than they?
We were all inmates of one place,
And I, the monarch of each race,
Had power to kill - yet, strange to tell!
In quiet we had learn'd to dwell;
My very chains and I grew friends,
So much a long communion tends
To make us what we are: - even I
Regain'd my freedom with a sigh.




Poem Number Four

Well highschool was a literary awakening of sorts. It was a time when I was introduced to many of the classics. Steinbeck's The Pearl, Shakespeare's MacBeth, Orwell's 1984--- the list went on. And I remember quite vividly Mr. Palesch's (my Sec III english teacher) avid love of poetry. He revelled in presenting us with literary conundrums. Thanks to him I was introduced to a certain Mr. Cummings and I could not believe my eyes or my ears for that matter.



Spring is like a perhaps hand

by E. E. Cummings


III

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

30 Poems That Changed My Life

Well here I am again with much less fanfare and a little more estranged from poetry than I've been in some time. Albeit, I have not been immersed in ars poetica for the last while... (in its stead) I have been pursuing other personal interests. I thought that this month of April which in the past I usually dedicated to my own poetry I might post some of the poetry which over the course of my life had affected me (for better or worse).

The first selection is a poem that I first read in the third or fourth grade (at St. Rita's Elementary - a now defunct primary school in Montreal thanks to the effect of Bill 101 and an out-migration of anglos from Quebec in the late seventies and eighties). I was asked by my english teacher - Mr. Simcoe - to recite it to an audience. It was my first exposure to poetry and even though I did not comprehend the full extent of the poem's significance (even then) I enjoyed the cadence, pace and the inflection of sounds produced by this piece. It might be a bit pedantic by my current standards & poetic sensibilities, but it did serve the purpose of setting me on the road to find out:


The Highwayman
(Alfred Noyes: 1880-1958)

The wind was a torrent of darkness upon the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
The road was a ribbon of moonlight looping the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn door.

He'd a French cocked hat on his forehead, and a bunch of lace at his chin;
He'd a coat of the claret velvet, and breeches of fine doe-skin.
They fitted with never a wrinkle; his boots were up to his thigh!
And he rode with a jeweled twinkle--
His rapier hilt a-twinkle--
His pistol butts a-twinkle, under the jeweled sky.

Over the cobbles he clattered and clashed in the dark inn-yard,
He tapped with his whip on the shutters, but all was locked and barred,
He whistled a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter--
Bess, the landlord's daughter--
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

Dark in the dark old inn-yard a stable-wicket creaked
Where Tim, the ostler listened--his face was white and peaked--
His eyes were hollows of madness, his hair like mouldy hay,
But he loved the landlord's daughter--
The landlord's black-eyed daughter;
Dumb as a dog he listened, and he heard the robber say:

"One kiss, my bonny sweetheart; I'm after a prize tonight,
But I shall be back with the yellow gold before the morning light.
Yet if they press me sharply, and harry me through the day,
Then look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though hell should bar the way."

He stood upright in the stirrups; he scarce could reach her hand,
But she loosened her hair in the casement! His face burnt like a brand
As the sweet black waves of perfume came tumbling o'er his breast,
Then he kissed its waves in the moonlight
(O sweet black waves in the moonlight!),
And he tugged at his reins in the moonlight, and galloped away to the west.

He did not come in the dawning; he did not come at noon.
And out of the tawny sunset, before the rise of the moon,
When the road was a gypsy's ribbon over the purple moor,
The redcoat troops came marching--
Marching--marching--
King George's men came marching, up to the old inn-door.

They said no word to the landlord; they drank his ale instead,
But they gagged his daughter and bound her to the foot of her narrow bed.
Two of them knelt at her casement, with muskets by their side;
There was Death at every window,
And Hell at one dark window,
For Bess could see, through her casement, the road that he would ride.

They had bound her up at attention, with many a sniggering jest!
They had tied a rifle beside her, with the barrel beneath her breast!
"Now keep good watch!" and they kissed her. She heard the dead man say,
"Look for me by moonlight,
Watch for me by moonlight,
I'll come to thee by moonlight, though Hell should bar the way."

She twisted her hands behind her, but all the knots held good!
She writhed her hands till her fingers were wet with sweat or blood!
They stretched and strained in the darkness, and the hours crawled by like years,
Till, on the stroke of midnight,
Cold on the stroke of midnight,
The tip of one finger touched it! The trigger at least was hers!

The tip of one finger touched it, she strove no more for the rest;
Up, she stood up at attention, with the barrel beneath her breast.
She would not risk their hearing, she would not strive again,
For the road lay bare in the moonlight,
Blank and bare in the moonlight,
And the blood in her veins, in the moonlight, throbbed to her love's refrain.

Tlot tlot, tlot tlot! Had they heard it? The horse-hooves, ringing clear;
Tlot tlot, tlot tlot, in the distance! Were they deaf that they did not hear?
Down the ribbon of moonlight, over the brow of the hill,
The highwayman came riding--
Riding--riding--
The redcoats looked to their priming! She stood up straight and still.

Tlot tlot, in the frosty silence! Tlot tlot, in the echoing night!
Nearer he came and nearer! Her face was like a light!
Her eyes grew wide for a moment, she drew one last deep breath,
Then her finger moved in the moonlight--
Her musket shattered the moonlight--
Shattered her breast in the moonlight and warned him--with her death.

He turned, he spurred to the West; he did not know who stood
Bowed, with her head o'er the casement, drenched in her own red blood!
Not till the dawn did he hear it, and his face grew grey to hear
How Bess, the landlord's daughter,
The landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Had watched for her love in the moonlight, and died in the darkness there.

Back, he spurred like a madman, shrieking a curse to the sky,
With the white road smoking behind him and his rapier brandished high!
Blood-red were his spurs in the golden noon, wine-red was his velvet coat
When they shot him down in the highway,
Down like a dog in the highway,
And he lay in his blood in the highway, with the bunch of lace at his throat.

And still on a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a gypsy's ribbon looping the purple moor,
The highwayman comes riding--
Riding--riding--
The highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.

Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard,
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred,
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter--
Bess, the landlord's daughter--
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.

Two For Tuesday - I'm Back....

Louise Bogan : Poet Laureate : 1945-1946

The Frightened Man


In fear of the rich mouth
I kissed the thin,--
Even that was a trap
To snare me in.
Even she, so long
The frail, the scentless,
Is become strong,
And proves relentless.
O, forget her praise,
And how I sought her
Through a hazardous maze
By shafted water.


--------------------------------
from Body of this Death: Poems (1923)

Love That Dirty Water...

Poetry in Vitro - Vol 4, No. 1

Just Suppose

That words have lost their cognitive significance.
That what is spoken registers
as the burble of roiling waters.
That what is written appears a cross-
hatching background to the visual stimuli
that scrapes the retinal dreams of social upheaval.

I have scored silence on three fronts

I have spilt principal on guilty pleasures.

I have built means out of jelly-bean sprigs.

Scream that lofty scream,
but leave my welcome mat unturned

Leave this place – my place – my private place.
I have run out of things to say.


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

The Day the Music Died

On February 3, 1959, a small-plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, United States killed three American rock and roll musicians: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J. P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, as well as the pilot, Roger Peterson.

Flight arrangements were made with Roger Peterson, 21, a local pilot who worked for Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City, Iowa. A fee of $36 per person was charged for the single engine Beechcraft Bonanza B35 (V-tail), registration N3794N (later reassigned). The Bonanza could seat three passengers in addition to the pilot.

Richardson had developed a case of the flu during the tour and asked one of Holly's bandmates, Waylon Jennings, for his seat on the plane; Jennings agreed to give up the seat. When Holly learned that Jennings wasn't going to fly, he said, "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up." Jennings responded, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes." This exchange of words, though made in jest at the time, haunted Jennings for the rest of his life.

Ritchie Valens had never flown in a small plane before, and asked Holly's remaining bandmate on the plane, Tommy Allsup, for the seat. Tommy said "I'll flip ya for the remaining seat." Contrary to what is seen in biographical movies, that coin toss did not happen at the airport shortly before takeoff, nor did Buddy Holly toss it. The toss happened at the ballroom shortly before departure to the airport, and the coin was tossed by a DJ who was working the concert that night. Valens won a seat on the plane.

Dion DiMucci of Dion & The Belmonts, who was the fourth headline performer on the tour, was approached to join the flight as well; however, the price of $36 was too much. Dion had heard his parents argue for years over the $36 rent for their apartment and could not bring himself to pay an entire month's rent for a short plane ride.

In 1988, Ken Paquette, a Wisconsin fan of the 1950s era, erected a stainless steel monument depicting a steel guitar and a set of three records bearing the names of each of the three performers. The monument is located on private farmland, about one quarter of a mile west of the intersection of 315th Street and Gull Avenue, five miles north of Clear Lake. A separate monument for pilot Peterson was added in 2008.

He also created a similar stainless steel monument to the three musicians located outside the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay, Wisconsin, where Holly, the Big Bopper and Valens played on the night of February 1, 1959. This second memorial was unveiled on July 17, 2003.

*source - Wikipedia

W.D. Snodgrass (1926 - 2009)

April Inventory


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Trouble

Miles From Nowhere on a Two For Tuesday

Quotes & Quotables

“We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”


-------------------------------------------------------------------------Henry James

Playing in the Traffic

The Band

The Liminal Poet

It's no secret that I have not been writing & publishing much poetry lately. However, I'm glad to announce that my poem "My Father's Hand" which has held a special place in my heart regardless of my poetic sensibilities has found a home. Darryl Salach, editor of The Toronto Quarterly has graciously agreed to publish it in the next issue. It's a print journal that has just been started up. This is what issue one looks like:

The first issue of The Toronto Quarterly is now available through lulu.com. Please click on the link to order a copy of The Toronto Quarterly Issue 1:

http://www.lulu.com/content/3888882

There is a great interview with Hollace Metzger in our first issue. She is a talented poet/photographer and painter who left the United States, moving to Paris to find her true self. Also in this issue are poets such as John Dorsey, A.D. Winans, Penn Kemp, Geraldine Green, Desi Dinardo, R.D. Armstrong, Melanie Pierluigi, Jim Johnstone and many more. There are also music and book reviews along with samplings of photography from Tammy Hanlon and Kelly Hayner and more!

P.S.: My poem "My Father's Hand" should be appearing in Toronto Quarterly Issue 2

Poetry in Vitro - Vol 3, No. 12... (or)... Look at What my Muse Dragged in!

The Resident Poet Wears Prada

“Who is this woman with the feverish grin?”
--------------------------------------------------Unknown -- to Everyone But Me



She collects designer tissue boxes
and perfumed candle containers.
She knows Emily – fucking - Dickinson’s
Poem 54 ad verbatim and has spoken
at length on the agony of her art form.

She claims that anguish is good
medicine for the lack of creative juices.
But she wouldn’t know pathos if it came up
and bit her Pilates - perfected posterior.
Be still for her poetry is in all the right places...

The literary journal she edits is called:
The Fear of Open Spaces. Her Facebook
list of friends is a who’s who compendium
of literati – she’s well connected -
to the lack of the introspective.


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

Margaret Atwood

Night Poem


There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father------the thunder
your mother------the rain

In this country of water
with its beige moon damp as a mushroom,
its drowned stumps and long birds
that swim, where the moss grows
on all sides of the trees
and your shadow is not your shadow
but your reflection,

your true parents disappear
when the curtain covers your door.
We are the others,
the ones from under the lake
who stand silently beside your bed
with our heads of darkness.
We have come to cover you
with red wool,
with our tears and distant whispers.

You rock in the rain's arms,
the chilly ark of your sleep,
while we wait, your night
father and mother,
with our cold hands and dead flashlight,
knowing we are only
the wavering shadows thrown
by one candle, in this echo
you will hear twenty years later.



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

Merry Xmas

No Time

This Ain't No Charlie Brown

Wither Whithers?

Some CPR With CCR

Should Poets Retire?

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

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

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

John Steffler

The Green Insect

John Steffler


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


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


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


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


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


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


lunging, fettered with stems of grass,


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


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


I couldn't believe the strength it had,


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

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

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


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

The Letter

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

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

Grasshopper, Snatch the Pebble From my Hand...

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

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

Hook, Line & Sinker

Carmelita

Off the Cuff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am the Walrus

Yes We Can

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

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

Going Once ... Going Twice... Gone

Badfinger

Palin - somethin'

&

This from Wordsmith:

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


Palinode

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


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

Ball of Confusion

Poetry in Vitro - Vol 3, No. 11

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

Pablo Neruda

Nothing But Death

(by Pablo Neruda - translated by Robert Bly )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Poetry That Sings

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

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





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

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

Autumn Colors in the Hood

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

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

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

Weekend Vibes

Reelin' in The Years

Randall Jarrell

The House in the Woods
Randall Jarrell


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Two For Tuesday + 1 - For Good Measure

Hayden Carruth: 1921-2008

Emergency Haying

by Hayden Carruth


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

The Not-So-Dynamic Duo

Autumn in Quebec

Tehila P. Eisenstat

Size: 18" x 24"

Medium: Acrylic

Rainer Maria Rilke

Autumn Day


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

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

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

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

Wall Street Shuffle

Two For Tuesday - Guess Who?

Another NOD

Deja Vu All Over Again

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

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

Paul Newman: 1925 - 2008

Everything is Broken

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER: 1928 & 1922 - Edwin Arlington Robinson

The House on the Hill
Edwin Arlington Robinson


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

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

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

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

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

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