Resurrection: The 2006 Poetry Thread

IN THE VILLAGE OF MY ANCESTORS, by Vasko Popa

One hugs me
One looks at me with wolf-eyes
One takes off his hat
So I can see him better

Each one of them asks me
Do you know who I am

Unknown men and women
Take on the names
Of boys and girls buried in my memory

And I ask one of them
Tell me venerable sir
Is George Wol still alive

That's me he answers
In a voice from the Otherworld

I stroke his cheek with my hand
And beg him with my eyes to tell me
If I am still alive too

I wonder how you are going to feel
when you find out
that I wrote this instead of you.

that it was I who got up early
to sit in the kitchen
and mention with a pen

the rain-soaked windows,
the ivy wallpaper,
and the goldfish circling in its bowl.

Go ahead and turn aside,
bite your lip and tear out the page,
but, listen--it was just a matter of time

before one of us happened
to notice the unlit candles
and the clock humming on the wall.

Plus, nothing happened that morning--
a song on the radio,
a car whistling along the road outside--

and I was only thinking
about the shakers of salt and pepper
that were standing side by side on a place mat.

I wondered if they had become friends
after all these years
or if they were still strangers to one another

like you and I
who manage to be known and unknown
to each other at the same time--

me at this table with a bowl of pears.
you leaning in a doorway somewhere
near some blue hydrangeas, reading this.

--Billy Collins

This is sort of a found poem, a telegram my uncle got from an actress he had apparently insulted in his newspaper column. He framed it.

Try again.

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/anth.html

When the rain-whelmed sky
drove the birds in low flight
I decided
I would search for saints.

In coffee shops I kept my ear cocked
for the bell poised over the door
to bounce,
in case a saint came in with
a wet umbrella.
On the street my eyes ran after
the backs of walkers.

All winter
I entered empty phone booths
to read the pencilled messages.
I tried alleys
where bottle glass, webbed on labels
sat, limp,
lashed in related green bits.
But always the saints were
elsewhere just then,
or I'd have noticed them standing about.

Holy figures billowed through my dreams
as vanes, their faces grey-veiled,
holding staves tall as themselves,
drifting away as day began.

I would have settled for one black eyelash,
any holy mite as evidence.
But the city emptied where I looked.

Eating cold bread on a bench one day
a paltry truth popped into my head.
As the bread mess rested in my teeth
I thought,
a saint can have no saintly life
until his bones are shaved of flesh.
I ran my tongue along my hard crowns
about an hour
before I decided
to spend the spring
running with dogs in the park.

-- Written by me in (I think) 1977, resurrected for this thread

Here is "Facing It" by Yusef Komunyakaa:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way--the stone lets me go.
I turn that way--I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

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

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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.