550: Final Poems

Living Room

Hope is not snuffed like a candle – well, at first, yes, but then it clings like a parasite –
it slowly suffocates yet again as the dawn light extinguishes a sleepless night
tearless eye and empty mind, creeping like a thug with a baseball bat. Unuttered
obscenities crawl through shaking limbs, pleading their pointless release into a cluttered
abyss. Then, giving in to primal screams an unearthly delight, a godless rite rights
the prostrate form, laid out not in a shroud and not in a shrine but on shabby carpets
in a disintegrating home, alone and writhing, scratching, writing. The sole soul
keeper of some memories, denied others, fades in a blaze of frantic being. One must
keep busy to cope and to suffer through hope.


Living Room, Part Two

At the end of the semester – well, not quite THE END, but, say, a week away – you do this dance – at least I do. Goes somethin’ like this: read a chapter & take some notes. They look so productive, marching across the yellow paper. Don’t worry that ten minutes later you can’t recall why they were important or anything else about the book between the notes. It will all come to you IN THE MOMENT. Type the heading for a paper. Now you’ve DONE something. A little gremlin called Procrastination jumps up and down in front of your face (in front of your computer) says this is the PERFECT day to vacuum behind furniture, clear out flower beds, organize unopened mail on the kitchen table. IT_ALL_MUST_BE_DONE_NOW. But being such a dedicated student – and after realizing the mail consists only of unpaid bills, it’s too early to plant anything & the vacuum cleaner died last month – you return to the computer, stare, and REALLY think for a minute: a game of solitaire is just what you need to clear your mind. Then another. & another. you just have to win ONE, then you’ll feel smart & accomplished & can really get down to work. By now you’ve forgotten what the assignment was & have to dig through stacks of books & papers to find one precious loose sheet that will answer all your questions and doubts. It says: Write a paper on any three class texts. You think, oh, that won’t be difficult; I read them all, kind of. I’ll make a list, you say. After an intense two minutes, the list has twelve vague items and fancy flaming bullets. This means you are ORGANIZED. This means you have IDEAS. Now it’s time for a sandwich & beer – you’ve earned it after all. That paper will practically write itself. Tomorrow.


The New North Side

Twelve hundred dandelions no match for one red tulip
Cats screech like babies being tortured and
Ducks fight as they bob down the creek
Sticky cottonwood seed pods invade all as
Spiders hurry through thoroughfares of dead leaves

My affluent neighbor smugly surveys his territory from the new cedar
deck on his new custom home approving the two yappy dogs
who patrol the bank opposite. Always on the phone and
gazing knowingly over here, he will march soon with bankers, brokers,
lawyers & councilmen, statutes & eminent domain. My wild paradise
his golf course utopia. Takeover is imminent. The American dream of conquest, conformity, & illusion. If it looks like a happy home, it must be one.
Such a threat my tiny rented cottage poses his tidy bloated empire.

550: Ode to Spring, Vishnu & Hercules

24 April 2007

Ode to Spring

The grass leaps four inches after the first spring rains
Soon it will reach sky and I sink,
sink – return to the primordial muck, then deeper still
a reverse Persephone descending by choice away
from burning memories of sun. New life is a cruel joke when
Gone ones sing out of ether, through portals like oracles,
and I demand silence.

I past our house – refilled with a circus of bells
of happy hippie party people whom I want to crush – and cringe.
I only returned when I had killed all senses, to move, to escape
to run not far. Ghost or not, it is haunted. Twice
you called into the dungeon; I answered, and for my faith, no reply,
Pleas be damned; you emptied the crawling silence again
like a morning without magpies.

They call to sell you cable services and ask if I am
Mrs. E. Do I make them feel like shit and tell them you’re dead
the hard irrevocable sounds shaming them to silence and stutters?
I want to just hang up. Which is more rude? I don’t care.
They plead through the mail for you to open a credit card
account. Do their powers really extend that far? Will you
purchase sheet music and repay them with arpeggios and chords?
Their fliers attempt enticements for lawn care and mattress
sales. Apparently you can take it with you.
I rip into tiny – invisible, I hope – pieces.

I hate the new me newbie, forced to swim, envious of drowning
Angry, empty, pretending. When my mask slips, I want to
consume Belladonna, drift into night’s shade. But what difference
does it make when I already live eternally with Hades.
Sun and dewy grass bring no pleasure, only shadows and ice.
Frost is softer with its scent of death, the illusion that winter murdered all.

Vishnu and Hercules

The flurry of ideas passes, replaced by a squall of nothingness
a stormy void obliterating all remnant of thought. Vishnu,
god of creation and destruction, creates destruction – truth
beauty melts into ash. Contemplation leads to confusion,
combustion, like crossing iron-spiked fields, leaving a trail of
shredded flesh and entrails. At the edge, the bones fall
and shatter into shrapnel piercing the unsuspecting with
thought fragments. No one embarks on the impossible task,
no Hercules emerges to piece this skeleton together, no god
rushes to breathe spirit into shards.

550: Jim Harrison

17 April 2007
Jim Harrison: The Theory & Practice of Rivers and New Poems
After Dr. Keeler pointed out my tendency to “take you on the journey” of how I came to appreciate each of the class poets, I had intended to avoid that. But, as one who has tried to read some of Harrison’s novels and has had countless personal interactions with the man and his family, I did not look forward to taking his poetry seriously (or for him to take it seriously, thoughtfully, and elegantly as he does); I really didn’t think I could do it. But once I quit imagining his voice reading them (intolerable), I (with a self-professed distaste for nature poetry) thoroughly enjoyed these. Harrison manages to blur the lines and exploit the expectations of the human/animal (nature) dichotomy without losing respect for either, and he does this in an incredibly eloquent way. His natural places are fully encroached upon by cabins and canoes, and yet there is no synthesis or true understanding in either direction between Humanity (and all the crap, physically and conceptually, that it brings) and Nature. Following are some comments on passages which struck me in this volume.

The Theory & Practice of Rivers
4 This is the ascent out of water:
there is no time but that
of convenience, time so that everything
won’t happen at once; dark
doesn’t fall – dark comes up
out of the earth, an exhalation.
This grabbed me, in part, due to its relevance to Sexson’s class with its ascents and descents, elements, underworld, time, and of course for me, spirals – “time so that everything won’t happen at once.” The spiral exists in interesting relation to both space and time so that nothing is every exactly simultaneous or exactly repeated. Time is here seen as so intractable that it is portrayed as the earth breathing. A similar theme is returned to on page 14 with a musing on circles and time: “And because of time, circles / that no longer close / or return to themselves.” Harrison shows his understanding that there are no neat and tidy resolutions, no simple or complete answers, and no returning to an imagined idyllic past where everything was “as it should be.” Harrison seems to struggle with nostalgia in this volume. He frequently uses the past tense, tells stories, and reminisces, but something always seems to be frustrated in the remembering, in the telling, or in the attempt to pull meaning out of these incidents. Perhaps this refrain is central to his project in these pages: “The days are stacked against / what we think we are” (6-8).
*****
15 . . . Who among us whites, child
or adult, will sing while we die?
How is the way a culture “deals” with death indicative of the way it lives and the meaning and peace it ascribes to a life? Does this suggest that “we” are less close to nature, and thus more separated from understandings of life and death, than are other peoples? This passage is followed by the story of a guy who, when he thinks he is about to die, can only think that it is appropriate, even necessary, to drink. This tale concludes:
16 . . . It is hard to learn how
to be lost after so much training.
I read this very reflexively. This aspect of an education in literature is one of the things that bothers me greatly. We become blind to so much because we are trained to look for and do other things. There is much to be gained from being lost. I liken it to my musical education. I was given piano lessons for several years growing up; I learned how to read music, musical theory, classical and hymn music, and just a little on how to improvise the accompaniment of hymns. Sadly, because of all this training, I find exploring on the piano, attempting to play by ear, improvising without a guide, or playing more contemporary pieces to be damn near impossible. And even though I’ve forgotten most of the technicalities and my playing is embarrassingly rusty, I cannot forget how to read music; I cannot feel my way around the keys; I cannot seem to lose myself without unconsciously falling back on my training to guide me. And because of this, I have not truly felt the joy of creating music, of being lost in that beautiful way that allows all possibilities. I have too much “system” and not enough room for texture and possibility, as Harrison here laments:
23 A “system” suggests the cutting off
i.e., in channel morphology, the reduction,
the suppression of texture to simplify
**** A couple passages which pulled me up short:
24 . . . Writers
and politicians share an embarrassed moment
when they are sure all problems will disappear
if you get the language right.
Damn it. I’m guilty of this. I just watched Labyrinth this weekend for the first time since childhood, and I was struck by its emphasis on getting the language right. Sarah can’t accomplish anything without the right words, but it is, after all, just a fantasy. I will admit, though, that I haven’t quite given up on the power of language, though I am not naïve enough to believe that “all problems will disappear.”
28 This was nature’s own, a beauty too strong
for life; a place to drown not live.
Is this menacing fumarole more natural or more important or more revealing about nature than a peaceful, life-sustaining pond with drinkable water? Nature’s beauty is “too strong” for us to understand or truly appreciate.
******
What He Said When I Was Eleven
56 . . . When I miss
flies three times with the swatter //
they go free for good. Fair is fair.
There is too much nature pressing against
the window as if it were a green night;
Cabin Poem
63 I reject oneness with bears.
She has two cubs and thinks she
owns the swamp I thought I bought.
While Harrison presents his speaker constantly surrounded by nature, he cannot get away from realizing that there is an inevitable, unbreachable distance between, on the one hand, the human, concepts of ownership and fairness, meditations on death and aging, and, on the other, the natural (Nature?), the land, plants, and animals, that which we only think we have conquered and understood.

550: Dipping into the veins of some contemporary poets

10 April 2007

Komunyakaa on the brain for this one, particularly his “Ode to the Maggot.”

Ode to the Calendar

Cousin of the wristwatch
and maple; you decree order.
Deaf hedonists and sloths ignore
while obedient slaves kneel

to your prophecies. Neglect
in turning your scales will not
reverse rings, erase lines,
summon rain out of season,

enact or subvert justice.
Perpetually March 19th, a mirage
fooling no one. You lie not of your
will but of my forgetfulness.

The truth is underneath, inside.
Ambassador of time yet
Insensitive to its verdicts.
False now; to the future,

never; historian and oracle
but dumb you are; numbers ceaselessly
parade across your skin. Even were you
not forged from kin, time’s law

writes itself
on her, on all.


Inspired by William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark.”

Walking to School

After cereal on the false cherry
table, I herd the children out of the door, pulling
on hats and backpacks. To their myriad questions
I have no answers, but still I search for words to satisfy.

Meanwhile, they have moved on to the next puddle.
The mud is thin and grey under a cloudy sky. A water main burst
yesterday next to the creek; it rained last night.
Lamme Street is still barricaded.

Uniformed men sweep away evidence of the failure.
The water department using more water, from hoses
this time, to clean up the mess of pipes, creek,
and rain united with soil, grass, and hedge.

The boys’ only interest is checking that the hole is filled,
while I stand before crossing the street. Did the tamed city water
and wild streams meet again or did the quarantine hold.
Was there joyful reunion, triumph, or suspicion, fear of contamination?

The sky holds no prejudice – all mingle there now.
Soon it will rain.

550: Alcosser

Perhaps I’m overgenerous, but for each piece (or author) that I read, I genuinely try to like it or to find something worthwhile or interesting in it. If I should find this difficult, then I try to see why someone else would (for someone obviously did). This is what I had to do with Sandra Alcosser. And of course, if you try hard enough, you can surprise yourself. For the first few poems, I was, admittedly, quite lost. I couldn’t seem to find a foothold (other than the obvious Southern setting, exploratory and almost adventurous nature of the speakers), and I didn’t like finding myself in the stifling humidity amid unsettling images and thoughts. The South is not a place I have fond memories of or want to return to, and Alcosser paints it vividly, luridly, grotesquely, pulling you into it and yet pushing you away at the same time. I felt as if I drowned with her there. But even by the end of this section, I was growing accustomed to her voice and able to honestly appreciate some of the poems, “In the Jittering World,” in particular: “Perhaps we are both lost in our landscape, / woman and chameleon always changing to save our skin” (20). So then, you can imagine my relief when the next section’s introduction whisked me away to another time and another place, and when upon looking ahead, I saw reference to my beloved Mission Mountains and indications of a much more genial and familiar setting. I’m not sure why this should make a difference, but it did.

Side note: I can’t decide if Alcosser owes a debt to the surrealists or if there is something else holding her seemingly scattered verse together. I am not always able to follow her leaps. Perhaps I’m not meant to.

The bittersweet nature of “Possessions” (21) and “The Red Dress” (35) gave both of these poems an interesting take on nostalgia and both the patterns and unpredictability of the people we think we are close to. Though I have to admit that I’m a little baffled by the idea of prose poems: I don’t quite understand how they are poetry instead of vignettes or short stories. Plenty of other authors write prose poetically but don’t call it poetry. So, of course, off to trusty Google where I find that the form originated in France in the 19th century from whence it was borrowed into English. Modernists like Pound and Eliot rejected it while Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson embraced it. The only line between prose poems and short fiction (particularly flash fiction and short short fiction) appears to be the choice of the author in naming it. Rachel Barenblat of In Posse Review (online) puts it this way, “if a writer calls something a prose poem, then it's a prose poem,” and that’s that. This mingling of genres and frustrating of expectations is a positive movement in literature as far as I’m concerned. I almost wish we didn’t have to name and categorize everything and that this could be a non-issue, but that is, of course, not the case.

Subversiveness seems to be a common element of the prose poem in both its paradoxical name and form and in its content or attitude. It is purposely breaking rules, and thus, while some may try to constrain it for a while and define it (I found some rather restrictive definitions in my internet search, laughable, actually), it repeatedly defies definitions, continually evolving. I can see its beauty and its use, but I am still a little confounded by the notion of prose poetry or perhaps just by the naming of it. Though I find it interesting that at the bookstore where I worked until recently, sudden fiction and flash fiction collections grabbed people’s attentions and sold remarkably well, while “poetry” sold rarely. Is there something in the familiarity, the appearance of a lack of pretense, the approachability of prose poetry that (like Billy Collins) will draw in unexpected readers to poetry while sometimes rebuffing the more snobbish elements of the literati? I have to admit that of all her poems, Alcosser’s prose poems are the ones that stick in my mind the most. But even then, they didn’t feel as poetic as I perhaps wanted them to. I didn’t encounter the kinds of metaphors and use of language in them as I did in her poem poems, and for this, I am slightly disappointed. I wonder how the process of writing these is different and/or similar to the process of writing in a recognizable versified form.

I also read some poems by the three authors listed on Dr. Keeler’s website, and I don’t quite know what to do with them yet. I think that, especially with poets who are writing unconventional poetry, I have to become acquainted with them in order to really understand what they are doing and what they are saying. I guess I have to make the Other not so Other by forging a familiarity or a relationship with it. In Alcosser’s case, after reading her whole collection, I got a feel for her style and her preoccupations. I got comfortable with her and was thus better able to appreciate that which I didn’t understand or didn’t like before. I was able then to feel her feminism, her sexuality, her relationship with nature, the way she explodes myths while sometimes still embracing her essence (this I found to be particularly the case in “The Intricacy of the Song Inverse to the Dull Lores” [61]), the way she explores the humanity in nature and the nature in humanity, as when she expresses envy for the “Golden-Mantled Ground Squirrel” (65). I was particularly struck by the end of “Trajectory” where she writes, “like orbiting / the planet on a tempered glass // windshield, one crash / and all would shatter, not shatter exactly, / but fracture full spectrum, like life / as we know it – radiant beyond rescue” (68). This is beautiful, sad, and true; it paints a vivid picture and says something recognizable in a way I had never experienced before. As I have only read a handful of poems by each of the others, I have not yet been able to grasp their voices or appreciate their choices, although I did find them interesting and provocative. They are still Other to me. And while I know that each poem should work on its own, I also think that the context is important. A book of poems can become its own (relatively) self-contained universe wherein each piece has its place and can build upon the themes, images, feelings, and rhythms of the ones around it. I didn’t expect to like Alcosser at first, but this experience of a whole and the way the sections fit with each other or contrasted or complicated each other has given me an appreciation for her poetry that I might not have had if I had encountered just one poem singly.

550: Attempt at longer poems

Wind Language

Hurricane breezes play zylophone on
metal shingles with birch hammers
Clangy, sudden, disharmonic
Now silent and safe
Or so it seems

After dinner the back porch door
she thrust down, lying out
lying to the earth
claiming to protect but
no longer serve

Except now it holds hors d’oeuvres
As an obnoxious new-old table top
it protests the burden of light
conversation, wishes again
for wind sorcery

to release from stability
and duty back to swinging
free yet not
hanging from hinges like nooses

deciphering wind-powered
Morse-code in the rain



The Day the Cat Died

I opened the windows and
pulled down the shades
I hate to admit – I cooked
salmon, ate none, then left.
Destination unknown
transport reliability, some

Dancing leaves mocked
her coat of many colors

so I followed then became
the wind chasing debris
swirls of dust then dirt
and mud, pebbles and bricks
fled before me though I tried

to creep and slink, leap
and pounce, my windness – no match
for her catness – gave me away
Apparent, I was; invisible
my thoughts no more

The sun erupted, then belched
away the clouds, scolding me for
impertinence. Angry, I banished my
airy self to the netherworld.
Finally – oh, finally! – I

crumbled like stale biscuits
my pieces scattered and disintegrated
the diaspora of me now infecting
streams or declaring oneness
with country lanes.

The sun conceded rule
to the rain, reigning heavily
on the conscience
bombing my streaming remnants
a million miniature mushroom
clouds of solid water bursting
from iridescent murk

but I remained unmarked
unremarked, free to sink
colliding softly with the
bed, drifting purposely
through protective stones
amulets of the deep

Resting, I wondered if
she returned to nibble,
invisible, the pungent
offering abandoned amid
frenzied shutters flinging.

550: Attempts at Surrealist Free Association Poems

Here they are, in no particular order. I'm not sure that I like them much, but there are some moments that work for me. I just don't know how such a conscious, physical act of writing, using language, can ever be fully free or unconscious. So, I know that some intention may have crept in here, but I found it difficult to "short-cut the mind."

Solitaire
ascending and descending cards
descending to the labyrinth
and Gollum’s cave through the
light of guitars the effusion
of mustiness and youth like an
elixir of gravy pouring from buckets
ever-present length of rope and
sand downing drowning

Bamboo
milky green and grapefruit
multi-hued multi-toned segments
of song brimming off the page leaving
nothing of substance except the
scent of brainwaves carrying the
message of turns through childhood
the elusive moral of sharing never
quite learned until mirrors morph
candles into clocks

Black and White
The animated soul of the pen
stumbles
creeping on all fours back to
the first love of page
and knight
castle and chorus join hands to
celebrate the marriage of money
and sense forever foraging
forests
of lines and squiggles for the one
which won’t escape
like a penguin in the Sahara

Search and Destroy
Blueberry skies and periwinkle oceans
blend into eggplant horizons
keeping the mind at bay while
the brain frolics through frosty
puzzles winning none leaving
some for the errant spider who
asks where we put the pie

Bubblegum
Pink Britney Spears Elephants again
Where did the asparagus go How
am I getting home Does the emperor
eat the ice cream Maybe his brain
is full of fluffy pink robots marching
to a mariachi tune I don’t know
where South America spills into
North America What comes from
purple pairings? Yellow submarines
dancing in a grassy field Snow
Harbor Why is the ghost in a sheep
costume and where are my cigarettes
Waterfalls trails tripping on stones
three blind mice coming at me
with a knife Awkward moments
of silence mashed potatoes and
cream

Glass Doctor
We fix your panes
My pains are the elegant delicate
old lady kind genteel in their torture
generously wracking
Muddy is messy and my heart
aches for pancakes but all will
be well when the lion roars
through my toes like the light
of a remote control

550: Chasing the Dragon

The following is inspired by the Chris Ellis poem of previous postings. I was at first most concerned with sound work as that is what at first drew me to Ellis' verse; somehow the sense followed. "Chasing the Dragon" is my tentative title, in homage to Ellis' "Finding the Dragon," and as I was also interested in the idea of addiction, the evocation of an opium den pleased me.

Coffee is percolating; clouds
of grounds infest the festive
waters in the press. I have
ground the beans and boiled

the water, measured, poured,
and waited. The silty silky-brown
scent of a dense, humid clime assaults
the anxious senses as I pace the

square squat rented rooms. The
drowsy feline seems to pay me no
mind as I will the elapse of minutes,
the evisceration of time until my

morning dew settles in a tacky mug,
unfit for ambrosia. Dust motes
tangle in the sunlight, vying for the
thrill of not landing first, basking in

being, rebelling as they float beyond
dictates of space, time, or gravity.
The cat has noticed them, though,
as the tense muscles in her hind legs

attest, watching, waiting for them to pose
more of a threat to her slumber. My life
quickens anew as the caffeinated
brew begins its dirty work.

550: Shoeless at the Sweatshop

This poem is a parody of one on Valpo Review. If you have read the source, you will probably recognize it.
With 14 lines and one instance of endline repetition, I'm guessing this is a bastardized sonnet. I could go on and on about how much I dislike the original, but I might offend some.

This one is for Jack.

SHOELESS AT THE SWEATSHOP

Shoes on the bench. Toe the perfect
line of grey Mister Marks, the harsh
taskmaster of red blood-stained fingers:
stretch their white knuckles right into an arch.
Contemplate your knobby knees
covered in undone black leather piece work.
Weep at the weeks and years
lost this way, where two feel like ten.
Stare at indecipherable symbols: you could
learn to read them in school, not here. Sore
young feet desirous of first shoes; cuts,
bruises aching to heal; feet
trapped under the workbench; feet
bare of shoes.

550 Original Poetry: The Notebooks

Will never be written in again,
those holders of his boundless ideas,
frameless words,
and cryptic thoughts.
Yet they could never
hold him.
None of us could,
hard as we tried.

He lived art
uncensored,
breathed through lungs sans ribcage,
free from the constraints
of most mortals – or immortals, for that matter.
I like to think that Pan himself was jealous
of those mountain highs.

Untamed time melts into chaos as
past and further past mingle
dripping into each other.
But they harbor no present nor future;
stunted like trees buffeted by winds,
they will grow no more tangled branches.

Reading them is like a trip
into another mind,
another world,
into the past which is not a boomerang
coming back to its place of origin
to be thrown again.

Reading them is trippy;
your imbalance is his design.
Don't be afraid to fall as you follow
the words recklessly leaping in all directions,
taking you places you never knew existed,
and some where you never could then –
nor can now – go,
for the moss, fog, and fungi,
while not solid or stable,
are eerily forgiving.

550 Original Poetry: Pock Marks

Her trail is precise, strategic,
the work of study and thought,
leading straight to the creek,
a destination
whose purpose I can’t decipher.

Like a sentry making rounds
her path is preordained,
veering neither right nor left. Perhaps
she is obligated to make a report;
her superior is awaiting her reconnaissance,
the legwork an integral part of a greater plan.

A sudden dash into the shed creates a ‘V’
and you can’t help but think she knows she was spotted.
Her cover, perhaps, blown by the little bird
whose twirp gave him away in excitement
at discerning the tortoiseshell’s plan.

Once she has forged the path,
once the snow bears the pock-marked evidence of her travels,
she makes the perilous journey again
and again,
each time mindfully placing her paws
in their designated receptacles,
molds of snow fit just for her.

And then I wonder if the retracing of steps is not
for her work as a spy or bounty hunter,
but is the rehearsal for her Broadway debut,
as she goes over her choreographed stage movements,
the slow-motion dance required for the delicate negotiation
of crystalline minefields.

At other times, I’m skeptical
and brush off her repetition as mere coincidence,
or the workings of a well-oiled machine,
whose pace and stride never vary, so of course
the padded paws find the same indents as before.

But deep down I know her efforts are deliberate,
methodical plotting
to someday catch the little bird unawares;
she plots to overthrow our aimless wanderings
and to usher in the age of the cat.