Resurrection: The 2006 Poetry Thread

The chandelier of stars
hung low above the field
when the angel closed on him.
He could not pry
porphyritic fingers
from his thigh,
nor break the granite hold.
Stone has no heart for pity.
He was lamed before night's end,
named before dawn;
shriven, driven, broken, repaired.
The angel could have gone on and on.
God asks much for little,
little for much.
We who have no choice must choose:
to win, to lose,
to wrestle with angels.

--Jane Yolen

we bad news force fly? similar side sandwich not.
wife am edge similar. news immediate purpose back.
slow whom music make pretty, bad wanted force window servants night. teach servants being goes companion?
drew carefully she rich why reference, principle wanted next immediate off, thus reply across,
letters a somewhere why servants music. how nothing studied speaking allow. added arms mentioned development shining anybody?

That one, though, is really exceptional. Hm.

All the time they were praying
He watched the shadow of a tree
Flicker on the wall.

There is no need of prayer,
He said,
No need at all.

The kin-folk thought it strange
That he should ask them from a dying bed.
But they left all in a row
And it seemed to ease him
To see them go.

There were some who kept on praying
In a room across the hall
And some who listened to the breeze
That made the shadows waver
On the wall.

He tried his nerve
On a song he knew
And made an empty note
That might have come,
From a bird's harsh throat.

And all the time it worried him
That they were in there praying
And all the time he wondered
What it was they could be saying.

--Waring Cuney

54.

ere
upboi ncheeose

idira,
toap t, stima
        disopera    teoxc

firty oeur pofour

paosleys lbecua

orusis vocm

mucis

              cham

[David Melnick, from PCOET]

I didn't even realize he was still alive. Oh well.

http://static.flickr.com/53/119009857_fbce943275.jpg

Wanting one good organic line
I wrote a thousand sonnets

Wanting a little peace,
I folded a thousand cranes.

Every discipline a new evasion;
every crane a dodge:

Basho didn't know a thing about water
until he heard the frog.

My Father Christmas passed away
When I was barely seven.
At twenty-one, alack-a-day,
I lost my hope of heaven.

Yet not in either lies the curse:
The hell of it's because
I don't know which loss hurts the worse -
My God or Santa Claus.

- Robert Service -

(just to show another side of him than Sam McGee and Dan McGrew)

-- Stephen Crane (poem 37, from The Black Riders)

The Holy Time

(1)

Like timid girls the shades are pacing down
The slopes of evening, trailing soberly
Their vestments grey:

Far, far away,
The last, red tinge
Is fading into brown;

So far!
So faint!
Seen but surmisingly!

And now the dusk of evening draws upon
That memory of light,
And light is gone!

(2)

The bee
Speeds
Home!

The beetle's
Wing of horn
Is booming by!

The darkness,
Every side,
Gathers around

On air,
And sky,
And ground!

The trees
Sing in the darkness,
Far and wide,

In cadenced lift of leaves,
A tale of morn!
And the moon's circle,

Silver-faint, and thin,
Birds lovely on the earth:
- There is no sin!

-- James Stephens

Note: Please try to overlook the overpunctuation of this poem, especially (!) the many (!) exclamation (!) marks! Ignoring these improves this poem immensely.

The Emancipators

When you ground the lenses and the moons swam free
From that great wanderer; when the apple shone
Like a sea-shell through your prism, voyager;
When, dancing in pure flame, the Roman mercy,
Your doctrines blew like ashes from your bones;

Did you think, for an instant, past the numerals
Jellied in Latin like bacteria in broth,
Snatched for by holy Europe like a sign?
Past somber tables inched out with the lives
Forgotten or clapped for by the wigged Societies?

You guessed this? The earth's face altering with iron,
The smoke ranged like a wall against the day?
- The equations metamorphose into use: the free
Drag their slight bones from tenements to vote
To die with their children in your factories.

Man is born in chains, and everywhere we see him dead.
On your earth they sell nothing but our lives.
You knew that what you died for was our deaths?
You learned, those years, that what men wish is Trade?
It was you who understood; it is we who change.

-- Randall Jarrell

"April 15, 2:30 pm. Experience Poetland — an experiment in poetic energy, featuring ten readings of ten poets. Arlo Voorhees presides over Brittany Bladwin, John Hogl, Lisa Steinman, Pat Hathaway, Jim Shugrue, Hazel Dodge, Geraldine Foote, Jeffrey Bershaw, and Tom Blood."

Are you a last minute stand-in, or have you changed your performing name to Tom Blood -- for artistic purposes, of course?

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

Anyways: Sarah Lawrence! I don't want to blab on too much, but some categories?

Famous old people of varying degrees of experimentalness: Eleanor Wilner, Gerald Stern, Marie Ponsot, Frank Bidart, Jean Valentine (http://www.jeanvalentine.com/poems.html).

Young Famouse semi-avants: Claudia Rankin, Martha Rhodes.

I don't know the other people as well. I'd say the best way is to just google or look at the Amazon "Look Inside" for these people and see who you'd like. If I were going, I'd check out Bidard, Valentine, and Rankin.

My reading went well. Or, at least, I think it did. I don't know if it was as shall-we-say "magical" as January's reading was but it was somewhat difficult and somewhat accessible material read very, very fast that people were able to get things out of. People seemed to especially like my emceeing, which is really what I'm known for. There was something of a fight at the end of the part I emceed, which was awkward and kinda fun and kinda not at all. It was "memorable".

In all, a reminder that I really have no clue what most people are thinking of when they talk about "poetry".

His poetry, to my mind, left something to be desired, perhaps because he thought that communication happened outside the space of the poem, or that a poem was something that one should be able to respond to immediately, intelligibly, and without your interruption doing damage to its sense or effect.

I have to say Chris that your emceeing was delightful, as were your 125 poems read with astonishing speed and dexterity. Also, thank you for putting us on to Lindsay Hill.

Yeah, I meant to post some of Lindsay's book here, but it was late. If there was a part you liked, feel free to post it...

Here I was able to read that The Poet Known to ILB as Casuistry...

"...began the 5 p.m. session at New American Art Union gallery, a block from East Burnside in inner Southeast. His piece compiled 125 poems, each five words long. No. 41: "Now now now no now" [others presented greater transcription challenges]."

Thus endeth the lesson. Sorry I wasn't able to make it.

do you have it written down?

"The Light Above Cities"

Sitting in darkness,
I see how the light of the city
fills the clouds, rosewater light
poured into the sky
like the single body we are. It is the sum
of a million lives; a man drinking beer
beneath a light bulb, a dancer spinning
in a fluorescent room, a girl reading a book
beneath a lamp.

Yet there are others—astronomers,
thieves, lovers—whose work is only done
in darkness. Sometimes
I don't want to show these poems
to anyone, sometimes
I want to remain hidden, deep in the coals
with the one who pulls the stars
through a telescope's glass, the one who listens
for the click of the lock, the one
who kisses softly a woman's eyes.

--Jay Leeming

For some folks "poetry" might mean words
that rise up corbelled and corniced,
elaborately carven as Corinthian capitols,
a sort of awful edifice of frozen music
or the death mask of a majestic thought.

For others "poetry" might mean words
that fall all pat and neatly done
patterned in rows as do the pleats
in a schoolgirl uniform's skirt,
which repeat, repeat and repeat.

For others "poetry" might mean words
dark, static, stark and few,
croaks, barks and stutters, bitter as gall;
not dead (you understand) because still jerking,
and yet too dry and hard to have much life.

With the best luck "poetry" means words
that turn and turn and turn about again,
continuing to describe a shape
the mind and lips and heart accept
as easily as leaves drink of the sun.

-- Aimless

Under the eglantine
The fretful concubine
Said, "Phooey! Phoo!"
She whispered, "Pfui!"

The demi-monde
On the mezzanine
Said, Phooey!" too,
And a "Hey-de-i-do!"

The bee may have all sweet
For his honey-hive-o,
From the eglantine-o.

And the chandeliers are neat...
But their mignon, marblish glare!
We are cold, the parrots cried,
In a place so debonair.

The Johannisberger, Hans.
I love the metal grapes,
The rusty, battered shapes
Of the pears and of the cheese

And the window's lemon light,
The very will of the nerves,
The crack across the pane,
The dirt along the sill.

-- Wallace Stevens (The Cat With the Mouse's Tail Between His Lips)

Although 'the window's lemon light' wow.

My skin is pemiced to fault
I am down to hair-roots, down to fibre filters
Of the raw tobacco nerve

Your net is spun of sitar strings
To hold the griefs of gods: I wander long
In tear vaults of the sublime

Queen of night torments, you strain
Sutures of song to bear imposition of the rites
Of living and of death. You

Pluck strange dirges from the storm
Sift rare stones from ashes of the moon, and rise
Night errands to the throne of anguish

Oh there is too much crush of petals
For perfume, too heavy tread of air on mothwing
For a cup of rainbow dust

Too much pain, oh midwife at the cry
Of severance, fingers at the cosmic cord, too vast
The pains of easters for a hint of the eternal.

I wiould be free of your tyranny, free
From sudden plunges of the flesh in earthquake
Beyond all subsidence of sense

I would be free from headlong rides
In rock seams and volcanic veins, drawn by dark steeds
On grey melodic reins.

--Wole Soyinka

I do think Aimless's poem about what poetry means to people doesn't address the people that the original poet might have been confused by. All those meanings make sense.