Audre Lorde!

A visit to Busboys and Poets yielded a new book and some inspiration...

adrienne rich

the first three of adrienne rich's 21 Love Poems

London Street Fashion.

One of the biggest things I miss about London, is the street fashion...
view photos by area of the city here.

"Dionysian Body"

spontaneously written a half-hour ago, if that...


















"Dionysian Body"

Milk-pale round balls of dough
in the half-light from the kitchen,
kneading and rolling them, the kitten
follows my fingers and necklace

swaying. The milk slides out into flushed
imprisoned sand, two dunes paired,
patched with dollar-weeds curled black,
as if by fire. Your calves bowing in

like the vase's neck, in the streetlight,
filtered through a white sheet
we hung as a curtain, and our cemented
hornbeam tree protecting us from bar-drifters.

communal creative energy!

ON THURSDAY NIGHT, I had the privilege to see two of my favorite bands (The Rosebuds, and The National) in concert together at The 9.30 Club in Washington, DC. A unique thing happened to me at this show, I fed off of the energy of the musicians so much so, that I began to spontaneously write poetry during their performance. And I was down front, literally, leaning against the stage with my notebook and pen, scribbling in the stage lights. This is a video of part of their performance below, and also a picture of what I wrote down (mirror-image encrypted)... The experience of a band's performance, I have often felt, is akin to a religious experience, or creative orgy in some way. Everyone is eerily shouting the same words, which they have practiced in their cars, bathrooms, or other intimate domestic spaces--pumping their fists, tapping their toes, nodding their heads in rhythm. And the band is leading the procession. And everyone is usually getting drunk, as well... So, I also had the thought bubble that the experience of a really profound live music performance must have been what a medieval Mead Hall felt like, plus armor and the imminent threat of death. But I will blog more about that on my (strictly!) academic blogsite: Intertextuality (http://thenameofthegameisintertextuality.umwblogs.org/).




...and here is a direct transcription of some of the poetry i began seeding at the concert...

"the cancer"

is spun fruit, tendrils spinning
a fine overflow of borders,
the aggressive webbing of seedlings,
misshapen and hungry
multiply and harden, metastasize,
grow up and give birth
in the time it takes to bat an eye
for you.

and i don't know the boy,
sweater vest, greek name, love
of answers and archeology,
but i nearly see
his fearful eyes, encircling center
like that of ink black
flowers, universe of ache,
the death-touch
assaulting his mother.


<>


walk off the stage
to let the thing play itself,
a tuning fork,
heart bursting.

<>


"Body"

i learned to count the bridges
down the Thames
like my own ribs:
spread fingers, running
out to sea.

a hand across my stomach
produces goose-flesh
like the pebbles
on Brighton beach.

wiry grass on white
chalk cliffs,
London my navel.

<>

In My Craft or Sullen Art

A bit of how I feel tonight is best expressed by the poet Dylan Thomas:


"In My Craft or Sullen Art"


In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

- Dylan Thomas, 1946

"A Swim in Co. Wicklow" by Derek Mahon

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/42

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derek_Mahon

cheers to having a notebook around all the time.

BACK TO SCHOOL, BACK TO SCHOOL! Which means that my life consists of having pen and paper in my holster nearly 100% of my waking hours. So, some inspiration struck between classes yesterday). So, here are the unvarnished results. I know that I always preface these with DRAFT! DRAFT! NOT THE FINAL PRODUCT! But truly, the crafting of poems takes time, energy, countless revisiting...but the energy, what I want to record, is in this first AHA!

Adrienne Rich says it beautifully:
"poetry can occur as a fierce, precarious charge in the imagination,
or an almost physical wave of desire[...]as something written down,
that remains, so regardless of circumstance
you can turn back to that fierce charge, that desire."



"White Whiskers"

I lift your rumpled, cast off
skin from the bamboo-inspired
rug, to put it on-- V-neck
with a hanging hem, hot-sauce stain
and fading smell of smoke and soap.

You're asleep already, so I feed
the cat and watch her lick
her pink-and-black nose, stroke paws,
and rub the tufts behind her ears.

We crack open a book of poems
I need to have read tomorrow,
and she curls, sighs
against the place where an ovary
hides inside my abdomen.

I can't fault you for sleeping.
It's not insensitive, or avoidant;
it's just the tremendous pause between breath,
the kind of quiet when you listen too close,
that maddens me, until I see
your rising chest, a beacon.

I think of him, knowing it tears
at you. Even in sleep, you turn
and grunt, stirring the pages
of a book, your bedfellow.

I see in white whiskers
sighing on your t-shirt sleeve,
white hair on the operating table.




"Growth"

Is it me, or this place
that has lost a bit of sanctity,
of joy? Crushed underfoot
in the teeming streets of faces
unfamiliar and younger than mine:
whatever it is that the sapling holds
in the moment of breaking forth,
can continue even on this uprooted tree.

The message has not found its way
to the top.

heritage. (my father's family)

metaphors springing up everywhere!

A FEW DAYS INTO CLASS, AND MY READINGS are already sending off streamers of ideas in every direction! This is what I love about school. A few interesting potential metaphors have popped up, which I will mention here. Also, expect some new original poem fragments, a reading or two, and a book review in the near future...

FIRST: The picture above is from the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, which I have visited. I have even seen this tomb. But, what brought me to this image was a the love-story of Heloïse and Pierre Abélard, a Medieval philosopher, which my Classics professor glided over today. It has tragedy, scholarship, violence...the works. I am thinking of writing a voice-poem in the persona of Heloïse, or perhaps their son...stay tuned! The picture is of their tomb, or rather "memorial"...all comes full circle!

SECONDLY: I was reintroduced to the idea of a "palimpsest" manuscript...and am finding it more fascinating than ever. The OED has this to say:

Palimpsest:
A. n.
1. Paper, parchment, or other writing material designed to be reusable after any writing on it has been erased. Obs.
2. a. A parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing. Cf. sense B. 1.
b. In extended use: a thing likened to such a writing surface, esp. in having been reused or altered while still retaining traces of its earlier form; a multi-layered record.
3. A monumental brass plate turned and re-engraved on the reverse side. Cf. A. 2. Obs.
4. Physical Geogr. and Geol. A structure characterized by superimposed features produced at two or more distinct periods.

THIRDLY:
check this phrase, from an introduction to Beowulf:
hapax legomena-- what linguists call words recorded only once in a language. Beowulf = wordsmith.

<><><><>
Okay! Enough for now!

freed verse?

SO, SORRY, I KNOW...I haven't been here lately. Actually, in quite some time. I have photos to share, and poem(s)...I just got busy, and got down, and let worry knock me off my creative game. But, I'm back! My senior year of college starts TOMORROW...and I feel, well, incredibly out-of-place/ elated/ nervous/ giddy/ worried about it. It is much harder to adjust back to school, after a semester abroad, than I ever imagined (perhaps it is that my city of 12 million has shrunk back to a campus of 5,000?). Anyway, I will blog-o-generate a poem. Now. In real time. Just to bare my chest and tell my demons, ha! So here it goes: whatever I am thinking of now:


I bought a new notebook
of recycled paper
and left it
out, in the rain,
and thought about how the old
me would never do
that sort of thing.

I spent all night
writng my name on twenty-some-odd inside flaps,
and trying to recall the name
of the High Street that she was probably on
in the 1970's, leggy blonde,
in a new pair of Feragammo boots(!)

What a tiny tragedy
are the blurring blue lines,
and the untraceable thing
that goes with Oxford Circus,
like we were going to The Social
for a drink.

I never once shopped on High Street.

pictographic.

"Aftermath" by Claudia Emerson

"Aftermath" by Claudia Emerson

"Eurydice" by H.D.

Because one can never hear too much of H.D....one of her poems. Also, I apologize for (already) falling behind on my poem-a-day posts. Perhaps late summer was not the proper time to start this? Alas, I'm trying!

"Landscape with Self-portrait" by Howard Nemerov

"Landscape with Self-portrait" by Howard Nemerov

archives(!)

The Dowser

I tore three pages
from the middle of March’s
Our State.
He was there: grey newsboy cap, down over
a fat, pink worm of a pouting
lower lip.
Born in 1920,
the dowser—water witch—
carried the sir name Scarlett
to Orange County.

He holds the hard kernel stick
loosely between his talk of God
and sparrows.
Before “Arthur Wrightus” he could
say how far down
the water is.
Now, he can only say where
to dig the well,
with a dogwood, hickory, maple,
peach or wild cherry switch,
a black leather hand and pink palm.
I can hear him when he says
he’s tar heel people.

The Corner of Cherry Street and Main in Marion

He says they are purple martins
dipping in and out of gourds
on the lawn edge, where we
found a rat snake at the cellar-mouth,
rotting pecans in greenest grass,
the wind chimes, and two
strawberry shortcake tricycles in the shed.

There is the flat-topped tin
carport, the out-of-place gym bar,
the out-of-use clothesline,
the well-kept hedge backing up
to a grass alley, two dirt
tracks beaten in by years
of yellow cars.

There are my grandmother’s pickling
jars, and the bird bath near the gourds,
and the foam always at the edge,
and the sweet gum balls
we pretended were spiny cherries
or small planets, suspended
around the stump that is always home plate.

There are the blue glass bottles
aligned at the kitchen window,
and the woman who adopted this house
and all of us, stands elbow-deep
in soap and water, by the thin-crusted
pie on the cooling rack.

Bathroom in the Isle of Palms Beach House

The place
where Moma stands,
naked back and ashen hair,
to Aunt Izzy.

And speaks of her children’s births
as personality indicators:
how he
didn’t breathe
and how, instead, she screamed:
swinging, red, and angry.

Talk of who has died,
while she’s slipping green straps up,
one petite hand to shoulder
at a time.

And from the doorway,
the mirror revealed to me only
the blue spackled sky.

Introducing: Delilah, the mannequin, and the late-summer Crafted Collection!!

a segment of "Hilda's Book" by Ezra Pound

a segment of "Hilda's Book" by Ezra Pound

A Poem, A Day! Starting with "Matins" by Louise Gluck.

I am beginning a blog segment entitled "A poem a day" (I know, original...). I am going to post my reading of a poem I enjoy here everyday for your enjoyment!

An interesting question, indeed, from CloudyDayArt.com...

Check out this link:

http://www.cloudydayart.com/2007/06/02/has-our-constant-online-connection-broken-our-connection-to-creativity/