Stability
Submitted by Average Poet Blog
The problem is balance—
which way do you lean?
We all tend to teeter
suspended between
the two fixed positions
we need to traverse
avoid looking down
it can always be worse.
Water Music (audio)
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Collection available! Knocking from Inside
Nicole Nicholson Poet of the Week at PSH
Submitted by Poets Who Blog
Big congrats to PWB’s very own Nicole Nicholson who is one of the Poets of the Week at Poetry Super Highway. Way to go, Nicole!
Click here to find out how you too could be considered for the Poets of the Week honor at PSH, and click here to read Nicole’s biography and a poem by here titled Revolutionary.
Send in your poetry news
Submitted by Poets Who Blog
Our friends at Read Write Poem would love for you to send in your poetry news. Email it them at news (at) readwritepoem (dot) org. (Please include “news” in the subject line, thank you very much.)
Click here to visit Read Write Poem
Life During Wartime
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
3 Word Wednesday: Corrupt. Intellect. Tension
under strange tensions
intellect and emotions
fighting corruption
Daydreaming among the paper mache
Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
By Ted Burke
Peter Everwine’s poem, Aubade in Autumn, published in the New Yorker in 2007, caught my notice last night when I was recycling magazines that had stacked up over the last couple of years. I chanced on it when I paused during the chore and flipped through a random dog eared issue and paused instintively when the poem appeared.
Much as I enjoy the writing of the New Yorker–I am one of those who consider it the best written large circulation magazine in America–the poets they publish over the decades too often take on a passive tone that strikes me as simply the equivalent of perceptual passive aggression, the pursuit of poetics in a limply progressing string of associations that haven’t the muscle to involve my interest in the stretch.
These are poems you open the door when they ring the bell and then collapse barely three steps into the hallway. I am pleased with their recent inclusion of the estimable Rae Armentrout into their pages, but theirs is a reputation for for poems that prate will take a while longer to live down. Everwine, a Detroit native, offers up a swoon for an ideal childhood; this is a dollhouse full of paper cutouts.
“AUBADE IN AUTUMN”
This morning, from under the floorboards
of the room in which I write,
Lawrence the handyman is singing the blues
in a soft falsetto as he works, the words
unclear, though surely one of them is love,
lugging its shadow of sadness into song.
I don’t want to think about sadness;
There’s never a lack of it.
I want to sit quietly for a while
and listen to my father making
a joyful sound unto his mirror
as he shaves - slap of razor
against the strop, the familiar rasp of his voice
singing his favorite hymn, but faint now,
coming from so far back in time:
Oh, come to the church in the wildwood…
my father, who had no faith, but loved
how the long, ascending syllable of wild
echoed from the walls in celebration
as the morning opened around him …
as now it opens around me, the light shifting
in the leaf-fall of the pear tree and across
the bedraggled back-yard roses
that I have been careless of
but brighten the air, nevertheless.
Who am I, if not one who listens
for words to stir from the silences they keep?
Love is the ground note; we cannot do
without it or the sorrow of its changes.
Come to the wildwood, love,
Oh, to the wiiiildwood as the morning deepens,
and from a branch in the cedar tree a small bird
quickens his song into the blue reaches of heaven -
hey sweetie sweetie hey.
In college , a host of us had a competition to see who could write the best parody of a New Yorker poem, our central criteria being who among us could write a poem that best falsifies an experience of city life with the kind of sticky rhetoric this poem gives us. Peter Everwine goes for the old trick here, constructing a poem based on something he heard or misheard, which is fine, but here he lays it on too thick for my liking. That a handyman’s singing a floor below him would spark an unraveling recollection of his father’s shaving rituals and the sound of his singing voice is entirely too convenient to be plausible; this almost reads like a parody of John Ashbery’s poem “The Instruction Manual”, (one of the very rare poems where Ashbery actually mentions work experience) where the narrator, a technical writer at work, diverges from his task at hand and allowing his mind to roam in a fantasy of vacations, islands, various exotica.
Think what you might of Ashbery’s style and purpose, but he does have the skill to convey the daydream and the unrooted associations the mind creates as it strives to create narrative continuity with the day to day. There is the matter of knowing how to use length to one’s advantage, which Ashbery does with effectively. One does have the sense of having caught a ride on the narrator’s train of thought and then feeling slightly changed once one reaches the end. Everwine’s poem reads more like a series of jump cuts in a movie who’s script had undergone too many rewrites. The tape holding the film together are very visible.
I might suggest that the dreamy set up be jettisoned and that the poem start with the father’s shaving rituals, his singing, to start at the point the recollection commences, and then pare back the self references. He’d have more poem, and less window dressing.
Poetry.LA Takes Performance To New Levels With Online Video
Submitted by World Class Poetry Blog
The following press release is published as submitted:
Poetry.LA is an online video showcase featuring established and emerging poets filmed at various venues throughout Southern California. It’s an up close look at a variety of poetic voices, including interviews with poets and publishers. The venues where poetry readings are held are also spotlighted to share with the poetry audience.
Poet/Artistic Director Hilda Weiss and Videographer/Producer Wayne Lindberg started Poetry.LA in January 2007 as a way to expose poets to a much larger audience beyond the intimate spaces of coffeehouses, cafes, bookstores and cultural art centers, where the readings are often taped. Poets can post the video links (uploaded to YouTube) in their emails and on websites, blogs, or social networking pages. Currently, there are more than 150 poets featured on Poetry.LA and the videos have received more than 70,000 viewings on YouTube.
Special features of the site include: 2008-2009 U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan’s reading at the Casa Romantica Series, video interviews with Cobalt Poets’ host Rick Lupert, the Ruskin Art Club’s Literary Programs Director Elena Karina Byrne (2008 Pushcart Prize winner), Red Hen Press’ Managing Editor Kate Gale as well as hosts of The World Stage Reading Series and Redondo Poet’s Coffee Cartel readings, among others.
Hilda Weiss’ poetry has been published (or is soon to be published) in G.W. Review, Nerve Cowboy, Poem, Poet Lore, Rattle, Salamander and Westview, among other publications. She has also read her work at local venues and when attending readings found that, “I’ve often heard a good poem at a reading and wanted to listen to it again. So, Wayne and I started out videotaping open mics and it evolved from there. We now update the site typically every month with videos of a half dozen new poets reading their work. Before we tape a poet we like to read their work and look at their publication credits. Since our end product is video, we are very interested in artists who have engaging performance styles. For that reason, we keep our camera handy for strong open mic performances,” states Weiss. Weiss and Lindberg also work on Poetry.LA with their Associate Producer Michael Child, a Los Angeles-based musician and poet. They hope to establish Poetry.LA as a non-profit arts organization.
Wayne Lindberg is a Los Angeles-based writer and videographer. His short fiction collection, Cary Malone and Other Stories was published by Nothing Moments Press in 2007.
His plays have been produced by various Los Angeles theatre companies over the past 25 years, including Pacific Repertory Theatre Ensemble, Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center, Public Works and the Venice Mooney Company.
Hilda Weiss’ business experience also includes technical writing, PR writing and photography. She is an active Kundalini yoga student and holds a 4th degree black belt in Shotokan Karate.
Poets featured include: Anne Carson, Luis Campos, Larry Colker, Brendan Constantine, Sarah Cruse, Jawanza Dumisani, Ghetto Priest, S.A. Griffin, Juan Felipe Herrera, Gina Loring, Rick Lupert, Sarah Maclay, Mike the Poet, Holly Prado, Luis J. Rodriguez, Amy Uyematsu, and Pam Ward, among others.
Corona
Submitted by Average Poet Blog
Although it seems too early
the winter sun will set
no point in being surly
or fostering regret
as Jupiter and Venus dance
across a twilit sky
some haughty ravens gaze askance
at he who cannot fly
despite the best alignment
we often find ourselves
repressed by a confinement
where sunlight never delves
but every body interacts
with every other thing
though beady eyes ignore the facts
and savagely take wing
beside the green container
where refuse lured the flock
examining who’s saner
will make one gauge their stock
while improvised confluence turns
this knave into a knight
a blinding burst of starlight burns
with unabashed delight.
Salt Dome
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Salt domes, such as the famous one at Avery Island, are often underlain by deposits of oil or natural gas.
Salt is earth-sweat, condensed and frozen,
slick as ice, and like ice it floats
upward through strata that buckle and split.
Even salt yearns for light.
Under this moon-white dome
a black lake sleeps. Once salt was treasure
and shaped the fate of nations. Now
we burn this sunless sea for heat and light.
This treasure-dome, these caves of ice
and lifeless ocean under ridge
cut deep by cypress-haunted chasm—
was this the dream of Coleridge?
Did Kubla hear ancestral prophecy of war
beneath this mountain, Avery or Abora?
Abyssinian maids and men
toiled in the endless dark to bring
baskets of white salt to light.
Now white men drill here
for black gold.
–suggested by Poefusion’s title Salty Moon and Mark Kurlansky’s superb book Salt. And, of course, by Coleridge.
Obscurum per Obscurious
Submitted by Average Poet Blog
The words they left were vital
to help inspire me
a spineless sort whose title
is now obscurity.
***Hello. Can you believe that 3 years ago today I started this blog? I was home healing from gall bladder surgery and decided to continue my online offerings with the next logical step - self publishing. It’s been interesting and I thank all who have left comments over the years. The first poem I posted was inspired by an annual garage sale I went to. It’s sponsored by a local church and always has a great book selection which yielded that year the complete works of (are you ready?) Keats, Byron, and Milton all for a whopping $1.50. Well at any rate, this year I went and found a pair of old books by Thomas S. Jones Jr., a poet I had never heard of, one book even says it’s only one of 600 printed! Well in honor of my three year anniversary, and to expose Mr. Jones’ poetry to a global audience, I present to you a poem from his book Sonnets and Quatrains printed in 1928. I chose this poem because it is beautiful and it also was the day my Mom’s service took place.
All Soul’s Night
On a hill, an empty nest that swings
From a bare tree bathed in tranquil light
Of a slow-rising moon; in lazy flight
A flock of crows drift by on ragged wings;
A fitful breeze from the far valley brings
A blend of sounds that die into the night—
Hoofs on the highway and the echoing fright
Of a sheep-dog, the stir of startled things.
On quiet slopes that to the river spread,
Where scattered leaves a shroud of scarlet fling,
Row upon row of silent gray, stones gleam
That mark the resting places of the dead;
Dead!—lo, they share the joys of deathless Spring,
Theirs the reality, and yours the dream.
But at least Mr. Jones came up in a search, my next obscure poet has the distinction of being the oldest published author in my collection, at least in the age of the book. This book was printed in 1868 and contains verse by one S. Stockton Hornor, enjoy:
The Dying Prayer
I always wished to die at sunset
May I behold, by light of day,
The fields below, the skies above;
As life’s dim shadows fade away,
Let me gaze on the face I love!
And may I hear that voice once more,
before my heart’s last throb shall cease;
That gentle footstep on the floor,
With echo softly whispering peace!
Oh let me see the sun go down,
Then calmly sink ere it shall rise;
And may I gain that priceless crown,
The angels wear in Paradise!
Aeolian Harp
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
We’ve lost the secret of building
aeolian harps, of carving stone
to sing like flutes when the wind blows
and these wires are meant to carry
human voices only.
But after you hang up the phone
when no-one’s pressing buttons
and no ring-tone is being sent
stand under the wires and hear wind
playing harp.
The latest press release from our friends at poetrydances.com:
Submitted by Poets Who Blog
Poetrydances.com Welcomes Six New Favorite Writers in October, Whilst Extending Its Reach Following a Significant New Arrangement with Poetry Website WritingRoom.com
Six new favorite writers were created in October on Poetrydances.com, in a month which saw an important new arrangement with WritingRoom.com, a leading poetry website, come into effect.
Busan, South Korea, November 05, 2008 –(PR.com)– Month after month, new writers and new poems are discovered by Poetrydances.com during its visits to other poetry sites, and blogs across the Internet. Poems are also often submitted to the Site directly. A proportion of the writers behind these poems are listed as Favorite Writers on the Site.
The six Favorite Writers created in October along with their poems and sites on which they are hosted are as follows:
Jenniffer Jude Slachtovsky with ‘Unzipped’ [on Poetrydances.com]
Joseph J. Breunig 3rd. with ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ [on Poetrydances.com]
Beatrice Van De Vis with - ‘Haiku LIX’ [on owlnight.com]
[discovered through poetswhoblog.blogspot.com]
- also ‘Diva’ [on Poetrydances.com]
- and ‘Tanka XIV’ [on owlnight.com]
Rachel Clark with ‘Unleashed’ [on Don’t take my wings- blog]
Nicholas Sheehan with ‘Found’ [on poetry.com]
John L. Snook, Jr. with ‘Pleasure’s Face’ [on Poetrydances.com]
Also, in a new and significant advance, poetry site WritingRoom.com has agreed to incorporate a ‘read request’ link back to Poetrydances.com, alongside all poems written and hosted on its website. These links offer to all writers of poetry on WritingRoom.com, an easier method of submitting their poems to Poetrydances.com for review and possible selection.
In recent comments about this new arrangement, Anthony French, the creator of Poetrydances.com explained:
“We are very pleased to be working so closely with WritingRoom.com- we see the Site as one of the most vibrant, friendly and accessible out there. Additionally, the standard of poems reaching us from the Site is highly impressive. This may be in part down to the broad array of ‘expert’ guidance made available to its members. In offering this guidance to help writers develop and improve their craft across so many areas, WritingRoom.com has presented itself as a truly excellent partner. We are confident that the read requests coming in from WritingRoom.com will steadily grow with time; bringing increased exposure for its writers along with the two sites themselves. We look forward to working more closely with other sites able to offer such a great platform to their members. ”
Lindsay Preston, creator and CEO of WritingRoom.com also recently voiced thoughts on the relationship between her site and Poetrydances.com:
“WritingRoom is thrilled to have established such a strong reliance with another website so dedicated to helping writers succeed. PoetryDances is a top-notch site and a must-visit for all poets. We are honored to have PoetryDances scouring WritingRoom for poets to add to their site and we are more than pleased to have a “PoetryDances Read Request” button on WritingRoom to help encourage and support writers and their dreams. We look forward to a productive future encouraging and supporting writers with PoetryDances.com.”
Poetry as mentioned can also be submitted directly to Poetrydances.com along with links to great poems found by users themselves. Additionally, the Site accepts general read requests, which allow its staff to visit and read the work of specific writers on various poetry sites or blogs across the Internet.
Poetrydances.com is free to use subject to the site’s disclaimer and terms of use.
###
WritingRoom.com.
Writing Room.com is for everyone because everyone has a story to tell; a letter to write; a school paper to finish or simply the need to communicate. Everyone has sat agonizingly in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen and the words won’t come. WritingRoom is here for you.
WritingRoom understands the struggles and demands involved with writing; the blank page, the writers block and the stakes involved with wrestling through the creative process. We are a community where writers can work, independently or with others, communicate, stumble, get encouragement and meet people with similar interests.
WritingRoom can help publishers find the next New York Times bestseller or producers find the next Academy Award winning screenplay. We are here to help students achieve that desperately needed A on their next paper and the business person write the perfect letter. As a niche social network, designed for writers, students, readers and anyone who has ever had to or wanted to put pen to paper, WritingRoom.com is everything writing.
Architecture As Poetry
Submitted by World Class Poetry Blog
Took a trip to the Pennsylvania state Capitol building today. Being from Texas, I’ve visited that state’s Capitol on numerous occasions and I figured the Pennsylvania Capitol would largely be similar. A Capitol is a Capitol, after all. Or so I thought. How wrong I was.
The Pennsylvania state Capitol building is an incredible work of art. Built in 1906 after the original building burned to the ground a few years earlier, it cost $13 million to build and furnish. In 1906, that was a huge chunk of change. Figure that amount in today’s dollars and you will likely have to scour the face of the Earth to find enough zeros and you’ll likely run out of ground to cover. Our tour guide said it is “priceless”. I suppose that’s a good word for it.
My only regret is that we chose to visit the Capitol on a day when the sun wasn’t shining. Both the Senate and House chambers are decorated with stained glass windows that would have absolutely shone brilliantly the 24-karat gold that decorates the walls inside. The paintings and murals on the walls also tell a unique story of the history of Pennsylvania and the principles that founder William Penn took great pride in. I really enjoyed the trip, as did the wife, and our three grandchildren, which act more like children since they live with us full time. The Pennsylvania Capitol is a true work of art to behold.
Happy Anniversary: It’s Been A Wonderful 5 Years
Submitted by World Class Poetry Blog
Today is mine and my wife’s fifth wedding anniversary. We dropped the kids off at her sister’s house and went out for dinner. It was an especially nice anniversary dinner even though it was not at any place super fancy. The first year of our anniversary was spent almost away from each other. I was at Fort Hood and had to ask for special permission to take the day off and we had just a limited time together. On the second anniversary I was in Iraq.
We were both looking forward to our third anniversary two years ago when we ended up taking the grandchildren in and spent the evening babysitting. The whole year actually. Last year was pretty much the same as they weren’t living with us at the time but the daughter-in-law was working so we were stuck watching the children again. This year I made it a point to get a night out and I’m glad I did.
I believe every man’s wife deserves a couple of hours alone with him on their anniversary night. A dinner and a little R&R to cap it off never hurts. Happy Anniversary, Theresa. It’s been a wonderful five years.
Assorted remarks: Creeley, Bei Dao, LeRoi Jones
Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
ROBERT CREELEY
Selected Poems, 1945-2005.
Edited by Benjamin Friedlander
There’s a new collection of verse by a great American Poet, Selected Poems 1945-2005 by the late Robert Creeley, and I’m obliged to go out and buy it. My paperback editions of his books are, sad to say, falling apart with that rare affliction for poetry volumes, poetry books with a cracked spine.It’s a fine time to remember Creeley’s mastery of the terse lyric poem, a major characteristic in a time when “lyric”for most writers mean lazy associations, odd line breaks and a verbosity that is more about extended a line than treating a subject.
Myself
What, younger, felt
was possible, now knows
is not - but still
not chanted enough -Walked by the sea,
unchanged in memory -
evening, as clouds
on the far-off rimof water float,
pictures of time,
smoke, faintness -
still the dream.I want, if older,
still to know
why, human, men
and women areso torn, so lost,
why hopes cannot
find better world
than this.Shelley is dead and gone,
who said,
“Taught them not this -
to know themselves;their might could not repress
the mutiny within,
And for the morn
of truth they feigned,deep night
Caught them ere evening . . .”
Robert Creeley’s poetry was the terse vocabulary of a man who feels deeply and yet has hardly a voice to equal the sensations that warm or chill his soul. It is the poetry that exists at the margins of and in the spaces between the huge language blocks of what is commonly deferred to as eloquence: they are thoughts, full formed and fleeting in their unmediated honesty of a first response to a new things or upsets, a poetry where heart and mind have no natural boundaries.
America
America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the worldyou thought of first but do not
own, or keep like a convenience.People are your own word, you
invented that locus and term.Here, you said and say, is
where we are. Give backwhat we are, these people you made,
us, and nowhere but you to be.
I sometimes consider the poet to be a film editor of perception, isolating key images and spoken lines in their spaces and arranging them in sweet and near silent succession where mood and sentiment are restrained but clearly present, nakedly expressed, without embarrassment.The surprise of his poems is that he seems to bring you to the “thing itself”, without the contextualizing and taming rhetorics that buffer our responses; this is his ability to move you in ways that never feel like coarse manipulation. Creeley’s was a vision with sharp-stick wit, the straightest line to a truth no one will admit seeing.
Thomas Gunn called it a “eloquent stammering.” I can’t think of a better superlative.
_______________________
Bei Dao is an especially fine and brilliant poet , and I thought it would be a relief to read some work from a contemporary Chinese poet who better brings together a modern diction with the tradition of image clarity found in traditional Chinese verse. Pound’s translations are so loose in their relation to the original tongue and intent that many specialists consider them to be not translations at all but wholly original poems instead. This perspective makes the poems a bit more approachable, and presents us with the idea that Pound’s misreading of Chinese aesthetic led him, all the same, to develop his notions of a twentieth century poetry where the image prevails over sentiment and empty rhetoric. Bei Dao, of course, has the sure-footedness I don’t think Pound ever achieved in this area. While Pound was busy mimicking an old old style (or what he took to be what an older style would sound like) ,Bei Dao neatly builds surely, delicately, all things in balance, indeed, not an idea but in the thing.
Branch roads appear and disappear
in the hands of trees.
Where did the fawns go?
Only cemeteries could assuage
this desolation, like tiny cities.
The thinking comes after the poem, for the reading to resonate with. Our fine poet here performs his art beautifully, the presentation of the perception.Here are other poems he’s written,scaled back to a sparkling essence of perception,
translated by Eliot Weinberger :
June
Wind at the ear says June
June a blacklist I slipped
in timenote this way to say goodbye
the sighs within these wordsnote these annotations:
unending plastic flowers
on the dead left bank
the cement square extending
from writing tonow
I run from writing
as dawn is hammered out
a flag covers the seaand loudspeakers loyal to the sea’s
deep bass say June___________________________________
Teacher’s Manual
A school still in session
irritable restless but exercising restraint
I sleep beside it
my breath just reaching the next
lesson in the textbook: how to flywhen the arrogance of strangers
sends down March snow
a tree takes root in the sky
a pen to paper breaks the siege
the river declines the bridge invitesthe moon takes the bait
turning the familiar corner
of the stairs, pollen and viruses
damage my lungs damage
an alarm clockto be let out of school is a revolution
kids jump over the railings of light
and turn to the underground
other parents and I
watch the stars rise
______________________________
The election of Barack Obama as President of the United States is a triumph of some great and proactively positive qualities in American life, and there is substantial reason to be hopeful within the idea that we have the Right Man at the Right Time arriving soon in Washington DC to assume the Office. It’s certainly a grand time for African Americans, who feel, according to some polls I glancingly observed, feel that we as a nation have taken a positive turn on racial matters; I hope so, yes, I hope so. But I think it’s important to remember what it was African Americans were and remain in battle against. A poem by LeRoi Jones:
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
(For Kellie Jones, Born 16 May 1959)
By LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)Lately, I’ve become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelops me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad-edged silly music the win
Makes when I run for the bus…Things have come to that.
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter’s room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there…
Only she on her knees, peeking intoHer own clasped hands.
Burroughs defined the Naked Lunch as what one finally sees at the end of the Newspaper Spoon when material illusion is stripped away, and here he gives a chance to exist inside the skin of someone for whom possible annihilation is a fact, not a metaphor. It still gives the chill.Jones (nee Baraka) was a primary in making me decide that I wanted to be a poet; his earlier works were an odd and rhythmic mix of black speech, violent surrealism and slow burning rage that would erupt, sure enough, into a vicious pyrotechnical beauty. Anomie was the key element here that got me, the crushing self consciousness that one’s life measures up to exactly nothing and that suicide was a perfectly sane answer.
Jones, always angry, was indebted to Franz Fanon’s text The Wretched of the Earth , arguing (in a nutshell) about the psychological effects of the colonization of their cultures. Fanon didn’t argue for suicide as a solution, but rather supported liberation movements across the globe to overturn the oppression.
Jones is taken with the notion of one being made to feel listless and without worth sans real evidence–the source of the decrepit pyschology comes from without, not within, he would later argue–and here isolates the malaise in snap shots, images, everyday activities that become brittle and poorly constructed.
He feels enfeebled, quite unable to change his circumstances. Jones would evolve into Amiri Baraka as he broke with the Beats and embraced various forms of Black Nationalism , writing poems and plays and essays that were deliberately problematic for white critics–he refused to be defined and contained by a white culture’s linguistic agenda. But he did write some brutally beautiful and stark poems early on, and this is one of them.
Two poems
Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Someone is in a garage (if we were imagining location), having a diet coke as they look across the dark room, past car parts and machine tools and into the glaring light pouring in from the street, talking past the person they’re talking to, summarizing the state of the economy, the community, their own slice of a wretched existence, and conclude with what is they’re willing to settle for. “It is no good to grow up hating the rich” warns B.H.Fairchild, to which our monologist, a persona who had read this quote somewhere and found a space in a conversation he was having to both cite the reading and to respond , responds thusly
Why not hate the rich? It’s easy,
and some days easy’s what I need.
This is speech from a Larry McMurtry novel or one of those films where a minor character suddenly becomes very chatty in a key scene and finds an articulate voice and give us the complications of his life and world view in a writer’s attempt to give him more complexity, and as a speech it might work fine given the context and narrative conventions fiction or a movie would allow. It might not seem so, let us say, incredible and contrived. It’s a splendid thing when a piece composed of a character’s voice works, with the precarious balance between natural , loose cadences and digressive tendencies and a writer’s control of the idea , in getting it across for an effect without showing his hand, but Joe Wilkens ‘ tone here is Hollywood production.
There is one thing for someone in theater to go off on a soliloquy in the presence of another actor , since good stage writing and direction can effectively imply that we’ve entered the character’s more resonant thinking for a few beats; the lights come up again, the other actor recites his line, and the plot continues apace. We have no such context in “The Names”. The other person this narrator is assumed to be talking to is never implied, and the notion that these are the private considerations doesn’t convince me either, since this poem strains between being a rambling string of anecdotes and a polemic. The thoughts are too complete, too polished. Someone with this kind of insight, or at least this ability to artfully phrase his details, ought to be able to do better than wallow in his own disappointment:
This country I call home is, like yours,
lost, and my people too are lost, like me,so let me hate with them, let me sit up at the bar,
and curse the banker, the goddamn-silly-designer chaps
the new boss man from back east wears,
let me speak the names of the dead and get righteous,
for at least one more round.
Barroom bathos, a country singer’s stoicism, a poem that seems more like something emerging from Central Casting than coming across as something made from things that one might actually have heard or had seen. Over rehearsed is the phrase for this, with the small town details arranged in such a circuitous way that they unintentionally expose what “The Names” actually is, a tall tale to flesh out Wilken’s sarcastic reversal of Fairchild’s one-sentence quote. It’s a lot of work for so little effect.
Mitch Mitchell, RIP
Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
By Ted Burke
Mitch Mitchell passed away this last week, and it’s an odd thing to realize that all the members of the original Jimi Hendrix Experience are now deceased. Drummer Mitchell was a wiry, pro-active, Elvin Jones influenced musician who was one of the few who could keep up with guitarist Hendrix’s flamboyance , both when he was brilliant (was frequent) and when he was out of tune and erratic ( just as frequent).
In either case, Mitchell was there, piling basic rock beats, 4/4 time, but often enough embellishing and tricking up his stickwork with polyrhythms, counter bits of propulsion, attacking the written and improvised structures from outside the progression and at times catching Hendrix on a sweeping uplift of rattling, snare drum cracking uplift.
One has only to pay attention to the Experiences first album Are You Experienced?to understand how important Mitchell was to Hendrix’s developing genius–the crashing waltz time he keeps on “Manic Depression” is a fury that condenses the mania of Tony Williams Life that provides a drumming excitement the equal to the band leader’s fabled fretwork, or in the tension Mitchell creates on the iconic song “Hey Joe”, with Hendrix’s vocal and guitar slow and insinuating as Mitchell performs jazz-slanting furies behind Jimi’s slow, snaking approach to the song’s message of anger and payback. The surface calm and the roiling rage under the off hand presence, the perfect dualism, musical and narratively.
And then there’s Electric Ladyland, one of the very few albums from the Sixties that qualifies as an unabashed masterpiece; one may discuss this assertion at length in other venues, but the point here is that without Mitchell’s amazing chops as a drummer , Hendrix most likely would have had a vastly different double record release. No one could do what Hendrix could do, and no one could do for Hendrix what Mitchell did, and it’s one of the great rock and roll tragedies that these musicians didn’t have the opportunity (or inclination?) to record more albums as great as Ladyland. But I am grateful for the great music that was given to the listener, and am grateful for the privledge of hearing Mitch Mitchell lay it down for Jimi.
The Poetry Foundation’s October Podacast
Submitted by Poets Who Blog
Did you get a chance to check out The Poetry Foundation’s october podacast?
Click hereto listen to the English translation of Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño’s poetry.
Gambler’s Epitaph
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Oh, sit by my grave and consider my story
My fate is a lesson that many should learn
I gambled for fame and I gambled for glory
I gambled as if I had money to burn.
The day Mom was buried, my father he handed
a no-return ticket to Vegas to me
and said, “Go be robbed by a cold one-armed bandit
and sleep in an alley and call yourself free.”
I rolled like a demon with gold in his pocket
I played with the best and I gambled and won
In neon-bright night skies, I rose like a rocket
For seventeen years I have never seen sun.
How green was my home on the felted card-table
How green was the money I gathered each night
I paid for my rooms and kept what I was able
and never suspected that I’d lose the fight.
“Son,” said the doctor, “that playing will kill you,
the smoke and the heartache, the drugs and the booze.
You call sleep a stranger and live on those pills, you
won’t live til New Year’s, you’ll gamble and lose.
“You’ve cut quite a swathe and you’ve been so successful
You’ve made a sensation and made it too fast
It sounds so cliche to say that it’s stressful
but Death owns the house and he always rolls last.”
“Well, dig me a grave and I’ll cut my last card-deck
Lay me out flat as a four-flushing hand
I gambled my way out of sorrow and heartbreak
I’ll sleep mighty warm with my mouth full of sand.
“Well, cut me a headstone and cut it so squarely
Mark it with spots like the spots on the dice
I’ll have no-one say I was treated unfairly
I took my own chances and won once or twice.
“Yes, cut me a headstone and cut it so squarely
with no name or date and no word of my past.
When Death deals the last hand I know he’ll win fairly,
I’ve lived in his house and he always deals last.”
In This Season
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
In this season of overflowing gutters and frozen butterflies
In this season of skeletal brown leaves rattling in the breeze
this season of cold sleep, dead ferns and sleet
we turn away from the paling sun
and seek warmth in the earth.
A moth lies spread in the wet dirt,
wings transparent and ragged with use.
We heap up dead leaves over dormant cocoons
in this season of arrested decay.
In this season hemlock groves are all that hide
the nakedness of hillsides from the hostile stares
of passing strangers. Look away, like Shem and Japheth
in this pitiless season.
Stuff to do
Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
(1) Give more readings. The Powell’s gig with VoiceCatcher will be a nice start. Also went to the open mic at Alberta Street Pub last week, and will try to make that a regular thing: probably not weekly, but at least a couple times a month. I’m going to go to a slam at the Hawthorne Theater: I may or may not participate, but I want to see how it’s done.
(2) Get audio blogging up and running in some form or other.
(3) Maybe assemble a collection of recordings? Not until I’ve practiced my delivery some more.
(4) Get more publications under my belt. Right now that’s difficult since most of my good poems are in one or another of the manuscripts I have in submission.
(5) Keep writing.
Seesaw
Submitted by Average Poet Blog
As jaded ravens jabber raucous jeers
from barren autumn branches amply bent
a lonely figure lumbers feeling lost
for callow trinkets couldn’t tame the cost
of vicious hatred’s vengeful heated vent
that plainly wounded pity wielding peers.
The dimness slowly dwindles, sending dawn
to open up the options users opt
for, quelling nervous questions’ nagging. Quit
the grumpy kicking, grow some kind of grit—
your mama isn’t missing if she mopped,
but younger efforts yielded errors (yawn).
To zero out the zenith of your zeal
will undermine the solid with unreal.
Scavenger
Submitted by Poets Who Blog
Are you a poet who lives in South Africa? If so think about submitting your work to Scavenger.
Remember, all other poets, if you stop by a blog after hearing about it on PWB tell them that Poets Who Blog sent you.
Sympathetic
Submitted by Average Poet Blog
Love is bound to multiply
when you freely give
and life will never pass you by
if you learn to live,
faith can often be reborn
with strength enough to cling
in pensive hours of the morn
when Nature starts to sing,
and hope routinely catches one
completely unaware
like when the folks we coyly shun
show how our kind can care.
***I wanted to take a moment to apologize for all the gloominess lately, I’m just having a hard time this week and this helps to get it out of my system. I would like to thank all the people that have taken the time to send beautiful cards with beautiful words in them. I cherish these more than mere words can explain because it is helping me get through the darkness. You are all in my thoughts and prayers.***
Great Britian protests proposed anti-terrorism law
Submitted by Poets Who Blog
Last month writers in Great Britian used the power of their pen to protest a proposed anti-terrorism law. Forty-two writers banded together to lend their words to a collection posted online one day before the parliment voted on the law.