Original Photographs + Music + Poetry

Check out this new video on Utube. The music is by Paint the World Yellow, and the photos are mine, as is the voice reading. The poem read is an excerpt of H.D.'s "Sea Garden." Enjoy!

Rumi's back on my radar!

RUMI

So, I find that all of my school-work these days involves writing poems, reading poems, and writing about poems. I love it. Love it. Even during finals week. My study breaks consist of reading poems that are not assigned... So, while attempting my take-home Modern Poetry exam, I set aside Frost, Stein, H.D. & Co. in favor of a little quality time with Rumi. I love his poems. I love The Essential Rumi volume that sits on my bedside table even more. The translators, Coleman Barks and John Moyne, have grouped Rumi's works into incredibly artful and inspiring "chapters," each of which begins with an "introduction" I find as ellusive and elucidating as Rumi's works themselves. Just listen to this...
CHAPTER 10--ART AS FLIRTATION WITH SURRENDER: WANTING NEW SILK HARP STRINGS...
On Flirtation:
The design on the curtains is not what they conceal. Artists love shapes for enclosure, the chained cup beside the waterfall as a way of tasting the waterfall and maybe even the presence of someone meditating in the cave behind it. Forms keep splitting their chrysali, but the old harper wants one more set of silk strings. Some sufis have seen the beauties of art as something that can slow down soul growth. Art gives a teasing taste of surrender without full experience. Beautiful poetry can keep one on the verge of the oceanic annihilation in God. Rumi says, we've been walking in the surf holding our robes up, when we should be diving naked under, and deeper under.

All of this introduces a section of poems that I find especially tantilizing. Here is one of my favorite excerpts from the poem, "Chinese Art and Greek Art":

In your light I learn how to love.
In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,
where no one sees you,

but sometimes I do,
and that sight becomes this art.

~~~~~~~
Drumsound rises on the air,
its throb, my heart.

A voice inside the beat says,
"I know you're tired,
but come. This is the way."

Are you jealous of the ocean's generosity?
Why would you refuse to give
this joy to anyone?

Fish don't hold the sacred liquid in cups!
They swim the huge fluid freedom.

.....................
(The questions being asked here are enough for me... They are enough. Is art the illusion? Or is art the freedom? Ah, Rumi... )

Lovesick: A Sequence of Lyric Poems

This is my Poetic Sequence Final Project! I have been publishing the drafts of many of these poems to this blog over the past six months or so. While the poems are not "finished" by my (impossible) standards, they are in final forms, of a sort. Enjoy!

follow this link!

Oh, Finals Week...

I find that there are two brilliant insights I always gain during Final Exam week...
1) A device that gave you caffeine intravenously would be very well received by college kids world-wide.
2) Final Exams are not a test of knowledge or skill, but rather a sort of decathalon. In other words, its not how fast you can sprint, but whether or not you are still standing after thirty miles.

The quest for good grades generally comes down to an ability to discipline oneself, and to go without sleep, food, or normal social interactions for days or weeks on end. I have written upwards of seventy graded pages in the last two weeks, and I have yet to enter finals week itself.
I am supposed to be hammering out another ten of them tonight, about Critical Analysis of the poetry of Mary Wroth, and an explication of one of Ben Jonson's strange little poems. I had better luck making nonsensical genius out of Gertrude Stein yesterday...
My professors seem to like to give us life-lessons around this time in the semester as well. Mostly, they keep reminding those of us who are plugging away in academic buildings cracked-out on coffee all night, that only about a third of PhDs in literature receive tenure-track positions at universities in this country. For those of us who have designs on academia, this hurts. So, to give up the dream is out of the question. But, ten years from now...or more, if I have a doctorate in literature and no job, what will I have made of myself? What will it matter that Lady Mary Wroth, Ben Jonson, Gertrude Stein, and Louise Gluck every teased my brain, or made me shiver with instantaneous understanding?
I want to teach. I want the energy and creativity derived from such a place as this. So on the cusp of finals week, I am sending a cheers out to those of you who are students cramming your brains and denying your bodies...and those of you who teach us, and are buried under mountains of ungraded papers, unwritten recommendations, and an administration breathing down your neck. To you, we say: thanks for the knowledge. It does not go unheaded.

Hopefully that has warmed up my brain a little. Back to the old grind...

Ramblings...

It's been a week or so since the last time I put down any thoughts here. Actually, I spent all of Thanksgiving Break writing a massive research paper for my Poetic Sequence Directed Study, entitled: "Louise Gluck's Meadowlands: The Palimsestic Mimesis of the Human Impulse to Create." Sounds riveting, no? It is supposed to make it to cyberworld on our class blog, so don't worry your little heads...

So, I find that in enersing myself in literary criticism and theory, I am unable to write my poems. Or if I do allow myself even one tiny moment of revision of my creative work, hours are snapped up in no time, and I have forgotten to eat, sleep, swallow, or do any of my other homework. So I banned myself from my own poems for the duration of Thanksgiving Break and hammered out twenty pages of genre theory instead. Sweet. Hence I haven't been blogging. I have been thinking about my blog, however, and how it will soon undergo yet another metamorphesis of purpose. I am spending 5 months in the lovely city of London, beginning in January. So, this space will hopefully expand accordingly into an ongoing multimedia travelogue, without losing its creative, poetic edge...

What I really wanted to talk about was a post I created back in the late summer on this blog announcing the departure of my mentor for another university. I have been elated to find out that he is returning, for love of the institution, and I couldn't be happier. The relationship of a mentor and a truly connected student is not a thing to be held lightly. The last year and a half of my undergraduate academic career looks like the most promising yet. Stay tunned...

Another long, difficult draft...

“Bird Tracks”

I.
Zen masters are to be
like the tracks of birds in the sky,
untraceable, always their own—
not self-consciously proclaiming
or not-proclaiming,
either.

We learned.
That was our beginning.
Five-hundred miles from me, you talked,
drinking only one cocktail before calling,
to calm your nerves, but keep your wit.
You read Buddhist philosophy aloud.
Eventually, leaving the drinks,
and claiming a dimension
you saw in me, in us.
I could not see.

We didn’t know each other, yet.
I preached the Middle Way. Then, let you
distinguish between your insights:
it is all meaningless,
or meaningful. No. I said.
It is.

Then,
we would change opinions, our minds
shifting like air.

II.
(I told you once, the child I was wanted to be
a feather-footed Indian, hunting.
But my walk is heavy-heeled.
No number of feathered willows caught around my hair
or war-paint
made me silent.)

It is
all I know to tell: what I understand
to be universal, and my suffering.
Self-conscious remembrances
dropping like breadcrumbs—
once each footfall,
each heartbeat.

And you follow, bird.
Slipping down from your tracelessness
to swallow what I’ve left there, not knowing
that there sometimes is
poison in the tales.

III.
I trail him
in my lost sleep, and imagine
that his breath still comes evenly at night,
begrudging him that peace.
You follow and cradle me.
I know you hope
that your hold might
chase him out.

You don’t know
how many times you have driven me down the street
where he still lives
in a brick house.

I don’t tell you all things.
But, surely you notice. I fall silent,
fingers clinching palms, eyes
hopelessly tracking the alley
where he collapsed me. Though, it was him who left
with bruises, bloody teeth marks on that day.
I could not hold my rage at his words,
ripping my hair and screaming, while the world
swirled closed around me.
Then, I ran nowhere
along root-broken sidewalk.

Surely you hear the crack of pain?
And can still see my colors fly down the sidewalk,
as I can? And see,
see the wreckage running a river
out my soles?

On the day he left, I was wearing
the lavender scarf I let you borrow, yesterday.
It is the one my grandmother gave me
the Christmas before I knew him—
a shield against the cold
I would feel anyway.

When that night fell
I found him, drunk and angry.
There was a bandage over his arm.
And he would not talk or look at me
as I sat down, begging to stay
in our bed. He lay down, clothed. Recoiling, even in sleep,
from my touch. Nauseated,
I lay in hell. Except that I was not dead,
and could not rest.

IV.
The days have spent themselves, with some effort,
for a year. The birds went, and came again,
re-teaching me to eat and sleep,
read, write, and sing.

To come upon you, feathered,
and eager to forge a path unfollowable.
I find myself as yet, unable.
You ask me daily to release my legs, the ground beneath,
the street, the alley, for wings
and the tracks of birds.

We could each make our own way, you say,
stopping only to rest together, to hunt and gather,
without possession.
Then, set soaring again,
one by one,
untraceable.

The reason Textiles starts with Text...

I have undertaken a new hobby in the last three months or so...crafting and embellishing all of my clothes with a few simple tools, needle and thread, fabric paint, and markers. Go to a thrift store, buy something second hand and create the text you want to wear... It's inspiring. And fun! I am going to start posting some of my TEXTiles to my blog. It's art, that I wear.

"Pigeon Spikes"

“Pigeon Spikes”

I.
He talked endlessly of the birds
of San Marco’s square.
But, you’ve never been there.

The birds, from a height, look like
living carpet, like so many grey hands,
fingers spreading and closing,
grasping and holding.
And from that height,
the spikes fang up in the foreground,
over gold mosaics of Byzantium,
of men brown-bearded as you or him.

I hate the stench of that place in summer,
putrid water found charming,
too many blown glass sculptures,
too much refracted light, colors.

I hated that his woman before me
was Italian, brown-skinned, dark-eyed.
And her name ended in the warm, soft whisper
of -ggio, -ggio, -ggio like wine thick on the tongue,
and a sigh of pleasure.

I hated that he could not love me
except that I had been there. I could tell of the stretch
of cathedrals through a grey, late spring sky.
That’s how we met—
I parted my lips to talk of St. Peter’s
to a room of half-sleeping American children.
He pursued me, that day. The next. The next.
After that, he walked me down the steps, every day,
faking a need to go where I had to go.

I hate that the woman with him now
has hair long, dark brown.
She’s in Firenze,
he calls her bella,
the thing he once called me,
beauty.

II.
I wrote letters—
one a day, postmarked to Italy,
that summer.

My Dove,
My Happiness,
My Wings,
My Sun,
My Everything,

Do not go missing…
I’m afraid that you are dead…
Or, have you fallen away?
I am no grotto, no duomo,
nor scaffolding to keep the pigeons at bay.

I have seen these things.
Still, I do not own them.
I cannot find a way to wrestle Venetian stars,
I am not so glittering as they are,
nor so near, in your eyes.
I cannot empty my head of heard voices,
sweet and cajoling, over your shoulder,
across this ocean.
I cannot kill the birds
landing on your arms. I am no spike
swiveled up, hanging bloody bodies
that would crumble our hallowed dwelling—

So, be prudent.
Be prudent.
Damn it; do not drown our love out.
You are just foolish enough
to cover what’s sacred
with the shit of birds.

III.
I lay face down in your bed.
I sleep this way, turned under,
though it bends my neck, crooks my spine.
I dreamt of him again,
last night, of birds.
I cannot speak or look at you,
through my pallor.
The spikes are wrenching up
my chest, or heart, an ache
that never quite quits,
coming in waves.
You want to take it from me,
but I won’t let you see the source.

You’ve never been there.
It is an ocean away.

"Music"

“Music”

I.

I am angry
that a year has not taken the pain
away.
He’s still here,
a spot on my happiness—
our happiness—
like someone writing words
over music
after the composer has died.

II.

You are playing—
my head in a pillow,
eyes on a book, or
the space just over it,
the cat a warm vibration,
soft against my exposed foot.
It is too cold to sit outside,
and now too dark.
The sun sets over a few leaves
clung on trees, and wires,
dead from breaking
off too many tender things.

You don’t sing
when you play your guitar.
Not while I’m in the room.
You hum the melody, maybe.
Concentrate the world away
while your slender fingers
count their way up the frets
and down, and up,
and down, making
that delicious sound-between-sounds
of a finger drawn along
a nickel and steel string.

III.
I am angry
that he is here.
Though, you mostly don’t hear him.
He spits through words clanging across
the page,
an interruption, ghostly,
of the harmonies we make
when I am forgetting him,
and listening.

I am rarely forgetting him.
I am rarely listening.
Though you go on playing.
And I am here, hearing.
One day. One day soon,
I will forget to speak,
the way you do when your fingers
alight and rise, in turn, eyes shining,
making something
of the very air around you.

I want to forget to speak.
And I will not need the words you do not say,
which cause you so much pain.
No more pretty lies, no more ghost.
Music isn’t written that way.

Birds in D.C.

This has got to be one of the coolest photos i have ever taken. These birds were having a bath in the fountain beside the Smithsonian of African Art on Sunday. I am still working on identifying them more specifically.

The poetry if Ellen Bryant Voigt.

I attended a reading of Ms. Voigt's in Richmond yesterday, to celebrate her upcoming book, a culmination of a lifetime of poetic achievement: Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 .

I cannot say enough about the melodic quality of this woman's incredible voice. As she was reading, the poetry lilted into a new life on her "southside Va-gin-ya" tongue. She recited, more than she read, looking deeply at a packed room of students, professors, community members, and others. Her eyes are a pale blue, and her shock of white hair is like the crown of an egret. She is an impactful pressence, but she exudes warmth, kindness, and laughter.

She spoke briefly, to preface the "new cache" of poems in Messenger about the nature of poetic sequence. I am trying to write a poetic sequence now. And, I am beginning to see sequence everywhere. Voigt spoke to an increasing turn toward the sequence among contemporary poets, away from the shapely volume, or perhaps, as a sort of mutation or progeny of the latter. She claimed her own fascination with the form of poetic sequence, with what happens when you "lay lyrics next to each other" and they begin to speak, one to another, to the reader, to the writer, to the literary tradition. Sometime in December, I will have an entire sequence of poems to lay end-to-end on this blog. Many of them exist in draft-form here already.

The reading also provided an interesting snapshot of a local literary community. Among the audience-members were professors from several universities in Virginia, including Mary Washington's own Claudia Emerson, winner of the most recent Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. And, the young woman who happened on an unpublished, heretofore unknown, Sylvia Plath poem, was also in attendance. The politics of literature, like the politics of any profession can be daunting to an up-and-coming, such as I hope to be. Social strata are interesting animals, and word-of-mouth is a powerful tool. I always wonder, where genius and interpersonal struggle meet? How do they combat each other? What escapes into the cracks as a result?

I digress.

In short, read Voigt. You will be richly rewarded.

Also, here is a recording of her reading of "The Feeder," a prize-winning poem published both in her new book, and in "Blackbird," the literary journal sponsoring last nights event. Happy listening: http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v3n2/poetry/voigt_eb/index.htm

gasp...Fall.

"October Trees"

How innocent were these Trees, that in
Mist-green May, blown by a prospering breeze,
Stood garlanded and gay;
Who now in sundown glow
Of serious colour clad confront me with their show
As though resigned and sad,
Trees, who unwhispering stand umber, bronze, gold;
Pavilioning the land for one grown tired and old;
Elm, chestnut, aspen and pine, I am merged in you,
Who tell once more in tones of time,
Your foliaged farewell.
- Siegfried Sassoon

"Locks of Hair"

"Locks of Hair"

I will cut your hair.
But I will not wind it
around my wrist, nor shut
it up in my great-grandmother’s locket.
(It is a gleaming, ticking heart,
longer-lived than her pulsing one.)
I am too afraid of you,
making me your captive, Love.
(With that,
your leaving
would make my life endure longer
than I would have it.)

I sleep.
I cry out, and claw.
His russet locks snake,
waving, crashing, imbibing me. Now,
his hairs choke my mouth,
in the way that he claimed mine
clotted his breath, when he
lay in our bed,
behind me.

Through closed eyes, tears still
swell to wrinkle my brow, and drop
from among my painted lashes.
Are you asking? He possesses my dreams;
though, in waking, I am with you.
He visits me, always, as a crier of cruelest
prophecy: that I will not love you.
And I wake to the smothering, traitorous weight
of having seen his face, but
having drowned amongst your tresses.

"One Youth Dead"

this poem is an attempt at the stule of Wilfred Owen, a modernist WWI poet of immense talent at a very young age. I am attempting to visit one of his central themes--death--in a more round-about way, and also to mimic his use of slant-rhymed couplets.

“One Youth Dead”

Find her, made tiny by the looming rocks.
Clamor to embrace, like the weed that wreaks
its putrid smell of death in her hair.
You will find no trace of her beauty here.
You will find no trace
of a youthful truce.
You will find no trace, no trace of beauty.
At death, it escapes, taking youth’s bounty.
You will find no trace,
No haste.

The form! The form! Ah, her empress locks,
her slender hands, her eyes do look!
At nothing, nothing, formless being,
Time has sent her spirit begging.

You enclose your eyes in ample shade,
and refuse to look at the unmade maid,
hoping her beauty (her life!) be restored
upon the washing of the shore.
Ah, wash! Wash! She is no more,
and all her beauties were taken before,
before her tender heart knew love,
before her faith had took its leave!

Do you find, redeemed, her departed soul
before her youthful cheeks grow cold?
Do you sing a song to make angels come
to witness twice the death of one?
Do you sigh for one who has been so lost
because of her beauty, her youth, your lust?
Dare you cry upon her chest, grown still,
when war from millions more does steal?

"Turn Back"

"Turn Back"

You have turned me back--
to a face feverish.
and tearful, with
the coming dawn.
I, who pled invincibility,
who bribed happiness--
for a moment's
dwelling in the
soul.


You have turned me back--
without fingers; with
only your snaking words,
whose venoms crept
along my shield, my spear--
and, lo, they disappear!
I, who swore--
allegiance to
marching
motion.


You have turned me back--
I crawl,
resting, belly-up,
among the mountains'
templars, holy,
victimizing--

Inscribe me with
sonnets to Love!
(proprieter of death)--
and to Lust!
(mother of my dull,
aching head)--
which turns me
back--
You have turned me back!
And I cannot go
on.

My Newest Muse: H.D.

This poem stylistically and thematically invokes H.D., one of my new favorite poets. Enjoy.
(for more about H.D.: http://www.imagists.org/hd/)



"Waiting"

Hang us, heavy,
among the leaves--
drying, turning, burning.
We ascend--
flamed brighter
than the orchard's
dressings.

Cold wind,
smite us! We wait,
heavy, for the ax to fall--
for the burning--
and the woodsmoke
which clots
our eyes.

Dark night,
find us! Nude but
barren--
in the first garden,
or the first
gleaming, rainy,
golden street.

Dark birds,
encircling--
We have died!
We have died!
in waiting for
a snow--
to rinse us, cleansing.

A Sidney Sonnet to Pass the Time...

I have been re-reading several early Renaissance British Literature sonnet sequences for an independent study I am taking. Among them, is Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, twisted, difficult, complicated, and unbelievable bit about love...

This sonnet is part of the sequence. It is speaking to me write now, through my writer's block and recent difficult musings about ethics and intellect, and the reasons we write...

Come, let me write. And to what end? To ease
A burth'ned heart. How can words ease, which are
The glasses of thy daily vexing care?
Oft cruel fights well pictured forth do please.
Art not asham'd to publish thy disease?
Nay, that may breed my fame, it is so rare.
But will not wise men think thy words fond ware?
Then be they close, and so none shall displease.
What idler thing then speak and not be hard?
What harder thing then smart and not to speak?
Peace, foolish wit! with wit my wit is marr'd.
Thus write I, while I doubt to write, and wreak
My harms on ink's poor loss. Perhaps some find
Stella's great pow'rs, that so confuse my mind.

-Sir Philip Sidney, Sonnet 34

I deleted some posts.

Against my better judgment, I have deleted some posts off of my blog from last May. I do not want to be accused of vainglory. I have never tried to use my private life to gain public acclamation for any talents I may possess. I am only able to write well what is urgent to me, and therefore close to my heart.

The Tiv of Nigeria believe that witchcraft, and the invocation of evil spirits to injure beings, can only be accomplished by those close to a person. I find that this is true. Only those close to us may truly hurt us.

I wish that stubbornly protecting myself did not mean hurting others. I have bowed out because I cannot rest well while inflicting pain on others, even if it means swallowing my own self-respect.

Perhaps my conscience will be free to write again now.

The
ethics
of
public
intellectualism
are
difficult.




therefore, I have notblogged here in a while...

"Butterfly Carcasses"

A cooler wind blows down
Off Canadian planes, hits the
Water and stalls.
The season of scrolling iron
Gates revealing themselves
Behind baring trees
Is near. And I find carcasses,
Butterfly wings, rubbed
Raw of color, everywhere.

Remember when you
Pled with me, to be of
Some fiber stronger?
So that my color would
Not come off at your
Touch. You wanted no
Responsibility for feminine
Fragility. I lied and promised
Not to melt. And tried
To harvest a calloused
Shell. But it was spring
And life lent itself
To wings, of powdered
Creation, of dusted and
Flitting starvation.

The window is wrinkled,
Old, thick, glass and
Closed. The being flings
And smashes, flutters,
Crashes, and if you listen
Closely—screams in its
Flapping. “What are you
Asking? That I shed my
Colors now? Make myself
Inert, and rip away my wings?
Or else give them patches and
Make them falsely whole?”

You no longer touch me;
Yet you insist that I fly against
The window, bash off
The stripes of history
Which bear your likeness also?!

I will not.
I cannot undress
Myself of words, or
File off the scales and
Colors that are hers!
(Only, hers.)