Archive for August, 2009
« Previous EntriesIn The Kingdom of Wind
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
The hills are burning,
burning. There’s haze draped
all along the knees of the Cascades.
There’s ash falling in The Dalles.
I can taste smoke from here.
A storm sideswipes the coast
and pushes air through the Gorge
like toothpaste through a tube. But no rain
this far east, just the wind
that drives the [...]
Wine Air
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Why do they bother selling wine?
They could bottle this air–
mountain air crisp with the cidery smell of ripe pears
and fresh-cut grass. And the flowers!
A riot of fragrance more vivid than their colors,
invisible tidal wave of tangy-sweet spice.
No wonder the bees are drunk,
staggering through the lavender like [...]
Sculpture Garden
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Inspired by sculptures seen at the Maryhill Art Museum. Please click on the links to see pictures of the sculptures.
wind-shaped metal points
to a line of leaning trees
iron echoes wood
(”Brushing” by Mike Suri)
this taco’s tasteless
but it doesn’t matter, for
the bell has no tongue
(”Taco Bell” by Tom Herrera)
face-on, [...]
The way to work
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
So I kept for myself
everything that’s holy
and shiny as new dimes
laying on a dresser table,
a birthday passes with only a hum
of a song , an anniversary remains
with the scars the event gave you,
on the streets we can marvel
about being above ground
in then sun, although it’s overcast,
indoors we [...]
The public fool who might flog us next?
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
It’s rather too easy to exaggerate the virtues of a renegade celebrity when they finally pass on and glide into whatever ethereal after-existence one conspires to imagine, citing some usually short lived early insights into the layers of falseness and bad faith that sap us of a [...]
World Class Poet’s Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-30
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by World Class Poetry Blog
A man in transition,/I just left prison./But not on parole./I escaped/when the Guard took a break/to smoke a bowl. #twitpoem #
A Man In Transition http://bit.ly/EgPMZ
#bookreview #
Satellite Convulsions: Poems By Tin House http://bit.ly/Cvyu4
#bookreview #
I lived in a tin house the size of an outhouse/with a phone but [...]
In defense of Daniel Bosch
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
It’s a scene any introspective sort will recognize or feel empathy for; one is alone in a cold, dark room, staring out of the window, gazing at the stares and the spectral clouds passing over the face of full yellow moon, contemplating what there is beyond this [...]
Stephen Dunn hits it hard
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Stephen Dunn swings for the fence with his poems, and when he connects, the crack of the bat is loud and the ball is lost to the suburban trenches.What I enjoy about this poem, “And So”, is Dunn’s clarity and the ease in which this sequence of [...]
Willendorf Pear
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Pear courtesy of Robert Radermacher; Venus of Willendorf courtesy of Wikimedia
Collection available! Knocking from Inside
Into history, or the dustbin
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
One advances into their art with no real concern about making history–their obvious concerns are about making their art, with some idea of what it is they’re advancing toward, and what past forms are being modified and moved away from. But the judgement of history–as if History, [...]
Moonfire: an insult to Mailer
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Taschen Books has published a Moon Landing commemorative “Moonfire”, a very over sized and sinfully expensive limited publication that makes use of the writing of Norman Mailer.The Taschen stunt-publication of this edition is an insult to Mailer, really, as it cannibalizes what was likely the one true [...]
Perpendicular
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Average Poet Blog
I’ve wallowed in filth the pretentious can’t bear
and swallowed the shit no elitist would dare
I’m one with the creature that crouches within
who’s done what he must, though they label it sin.
I’ve curbed my ambition – for what is the use?
Disturbed by the angle of those more obtuse
I’ll [...]
Dropping a Glass Armonica
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
3 Word Wednesday: Fracture. Noise. Vanish.
music vanishes
swallowed by shattering noise
fractured symphony
Glass armonica courtesy of Wikipedia.
Collection available! Knocking from Inside
Balloons
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
Reposted for Miss Rumphius’ back-to-school prompt.
A bunch of bright-colored balloons rises,
like a spray of October maple in the wind
silhouetted against the pearl-grey sky
of fall. Out of sight, around the corner
a string slipped from someone’s grasp and freed
a bunch of bright-colored balloons to rise
like firebirds above a [...]
Higher Text
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
School? I never left. But nowadays
I copy lessons from the windy sky
where God works out divine arithmetic
and sentence diagrams. My textbook’s page?
The living world. My class, the human race
carving our names on desks at Terra High.
My notes are flesh, all scribbled over thick
lined with the shorthand [...]
EDWARD “Teddy” KENNEDY, RIP
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
William Bronk and Wallace Stevens
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World
William Bronk
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
–which what?–something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For [...]
Jackson MacLow
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Jackson Mac Low came to read and lecture at the University of California, San Diego in the late Seventies while I was an undergraduate there, a benefit of having a Literature Department whose poetry doyens in presenting experimental artists. The reading was in a basement room of [...]
The Tyranny of Mass Taste
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Robert Pinsky perhaps is trying to have us yank out of our hair by tweaking all our pronouncements of what “real poetry” with a banal choice slush pile. “Richard Noel” by Harry Thomas is a hard one to critique because it’s meaning is so obvious, so direct [...]
Gluck’s private party
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Ted Burke Blog
Louise Gluck’s poem,”Crater Lake”,is cold as crypt marble. This is the second Louise Gluck poem that we’ve been presented with in two months, and I’m more convinced than ever that she has even less useful things to say to the land of the living.”Crater Lake” has all [...]
Wind Farms
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
From a distance they’re spiky white heiroglyphs
that seem to stitch blue air to golden earth.
But up close, they’re giants
swinging triskelial arms far above the head
of a man on a swaybacked horse!
Sucking down power from an endless sky
they spin kaleidoscope shadows across the thirsty ground
on days when [...]
Cupcakes
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
I don’t know why they came out so different. I followed the recipe exactly.
Original images: muffin by Horváth Dénes Péter; eye outline by Jef Bettens; green eye by sofamonkez; fiery eye by Knakharses
Collection available! Knocking from Inside
World Class Poet’s Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-23
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by World Class Poetry Blog
RT @ruinedXfinery: #twitpoem corrupted women-rouged nipples-torn stockings-swaying hips-men sharp as blades-addicted to–ruined finery #
A mint curdling scream,/the knife broke skin./Her soft girlish grin/and blood-grimed hands/muttered/”I’ve loved many men.” #twitpoem #
Blue Mist White Rain http://bit.ly/P8VFa
#bookreview #
Bemused,/she used us,/tossed us aside;/now she’s no one to deride. #twitpoem #
Poetry [...]
World Class Poet’s Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-08-23
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by World Class Poetry Blog
RT @ruinedXfinery: #twitpoem corrupted women-rouged nipples-torn stockings-swaying hips-men sharp as blades-addicted to–ruined finery #
A mint curdling scream,/the knife broke skin./Her soft girlish grin/and blood-grimed hands/muttered/”I’ve loved many men.” #twitpoem #
Blue Mist White Rain http://bit.ly/P8VFa
#bookreview #
Bemused,/she used us,/tossed us aside;/now she’s no one to deride. #twitpoem #
Poetry [...]
Beach House
Rating 3.00 out of 5
[?]Submitted by Knocking from Inside Blog
A beach house should be built from driftwood,
cedar logs rust-red at the heart and bleached to silver outside.
A beach house should be floored with water-smoothed cobbles
bedded in mortar one step up from hardened sand.
A beach house should be thatched with dried dune grass,
windowed with brown and [...]