2 Comments:

at 8:55 PM  Anonymous said...

Hi, Allen. The Andy Worhol effect has its points of interest. The cactus picture and the one of the cat came out very interestingly in the multiply negating shades.

I've spent hours today and yesterday here. You have a great talent for putting together fine art from different venues. I'll be lurking more often.

Marie Gail

at 7:51 PM  Alice Folkart said...

Allen, I like the art, it's restful in a weird way, I mean, I don't have to know anything to look at it and I don't have to explain it to anyone... Well, that makes no sense.

Much good stuff in this issue - particularly like Arlene Ang's and Marie Gail S's and the three of yours that you ended with. Also, this was the first Rimbaud that I could get through. But, won't go into that. So many other good things - I should take notes before I open the comment window. I can never remember it all.

Enjoyed.
Alice

Post a Comment

sky hook   Friday, March 21, 2008

III.3.4.



So here we are again. Welcome.








I was going to start this week with a series of short poems from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, but apparently the outlaws weren't too much into brevity, so instead I have this piece from Henry Miller, second choice but definitely not second rate.



A Poem in Prose for My Venus

Were you conscious last night
Of the grandeur of the moon?
Did you know that she has a pound of honey?
You, oh pound of honey for all the couples
Crouched together everywhere in the world.
The men on their backs their phalluses
in huge erection.
The women, their vaginas sighing
and flashing.
All making love like
animals of hell.
All bridled by the desire -
the incredibly fruitful desire.
The air was pierced by the bizarre sounds -
the groaning of elephants, the "whinnying" of horses and the
bleating of
calves.
It would be deplorable if everything was not commanded by the God Priapus.
His stamp was visible here and there -
briefly, everywhere.
He reined over the night like an
emperor...Sometimes it was terrible.
But little by little one heard the Chopinesque music, the
nostalgia,
the sobs, the cries of the camels - everything
was very beautiful
Chopin and Ravel - and Debussy!
Oh what divine music! Played by an angel with the refinement
of a prince.
Suddenly a resurrection.
The obscured couples rise and
begin to sing.
Their voices reach the edge of the sky.
Even the dead are touched.
The dead are revived, delirious
Now the birds can also
be heard.
"Hark hark the lark at Heaven's gate...et tra la la"
Yes the dead and the angels understand
English - how odd it is.
The gods and the half-gods speak
Hungarian and Polish
But only amongst themselves!
The dawn arrives...everything becomes
silent. The world breathes.
The angels disappear into the
images of Fra Angelico.
Da Vinci sleeps. Botticelli opens his eyes.
The world begins under a
Pale blue sky. Rather bluish.
Until we see each other again








Here's a poem by S. Thomas Summers from his book Rather, It Should Shine.

I read Scott's work often on The Wild Poetry Forum. He is a teacher of English at Wayne Hills High School in Wayne, New Jersey. His poems have appeared in various print and online journals. His previous chapbook, Death settled well won Shadows Ink Publications 7th Biannual Chapbook Competition.



Bruise

I'm not delicate
enough to slip

between rose petals,
but I'd like to see the world

from that velvet cradle -
feel the sun's gentle

fingers pull me
toward eternity,

discover ecstasy
in a rain drop.

Tonight, kiss softly -
even as a breeze bites

the apple dangling
from its tree. Darkness

scratches my skin -
how easily I bruise.








Now, here are two short poems by Portuguese poet Eugenio De Andrade from his book Forbidden Words. It is a bilingual book, with English translations by Alexis Levitin.



In Praise of Fire

A day
of utter sweetness comes:
everything burns.

Light burns
in the windows of tenderness.

Birds,
in the bright
labyrinth of whitewashed walls.

Words burn,
the purple shade of ships.

The wind,

where I have a house
on the edge of autumn.

The lemon tree, the hills.

Everything burns
in the utter sluggish
sweetness of the afternoon.



The Art of Navigation

See how the summer
suddenly
turns to water on your bread,

and the night turns to boat,

and my hand to sailor.








Read a story in the National Geographic. Wrote a poem. There you go.



time to meet our fellows

i was reading
in National Geographic
about the intelligence
of some of our fellow
earthly creatures

dolphins
with vocabulary, syntax
and a creative imagination;
birds
that remember the past
and plan for the future;
Kanzi, the bonobo,
learning sign language
spontaneously
from watching his mother
being taught (he may be speaking
English, they think, just too fast
and high pitched
for our ears to understand);
Betsy, the border collie, who
recognizes objects from photographs,
and who knows 340 words and
is learning more at the advancement rate
of a 4-year old;
even octopi
who play for the fun of the playing

more and more
we begin to recognize
kinship
with creatures
not of our own kind

except for some,
the egocentric,
the ethnocentric,
the homo sapien-centric
who
imagine
the world
and all the universe that surrounds it
as a preserve
set aside for their pleasure and exploitation;

these do not believe

these cannot believe,
having
too much invested
in an unearned superiority
over all other creatures

their disbelief is their loss,

but i know better
for i have watched
my Reba watching

and though
I cannot know for certain
what goes on
behind those cinnamon eyes,
i do know
it is far more
than just the mindless grinding
of an unthinking id








Here's another poem from Good Poems for Hard Times, this one by Leah Furnas.

Furnas, born in 1933, is form Oregon, growing up in her parent's tavern. She taught elementary school for 20 years, then sold real estate for the next 20, then retired, took a poetry class and started writing. She wrote this poem on a steno pad brought at a gas station on the way to a friend's 50th wedding anniversary party.



The Longly-Weds Know

That it isn't about the Golden Anniversary at all,
But about all the unremarkable years
that Hallmark doesn't have a card for.

It's about the 2nd anniversary when they were surprised
to find they cared for each other more than last year

And the 4th when both kids had chickenpox
and she threw her shoe at him for no real reason

And the 6th when he accidentally got drunk on the way
home from work because being a husband and father
was so damn hard

It's about the 11th and 12th and 13th years when
they discovered they could survive crisis

and the 22nd anniversary when they looked
at each other across the empty nest, and found it good.

It's about the 37th year when she finally
decided she could never change him

and the 38th when he decided
a little change wasn't that bad

It's about the 46th anniversary when they both
bought cards, and forgot to give them to each other

But most of all it's about the end of the 49th year
when they discovered you don't have to be old

to have your 50th anniversary!!!!








Here's a good friend of "Here and Now", Dave Ruslander, with two poems from his book Voices in my Head.



Parched

I am a dry wash in the desert,
cracked impacted - hard.
Smell the heat float over
as I simmer in midday sun
and await dueling scorpions
under night's sky.

Eventually,
a wall of water
will transform me;
flowers will bloom on a cactus.


I Stepped Back and
Blew Out the Candle

Darkness became my partner
and wrapped cold arms around me
in a difficult intimacy.

I felt as much a lion as a lamb.








Next, a piece by Jack Kerouac from his book Mexico City Blues.



216th-C Chorus

Well roofed pleasant little hut,
    screened from winds:
That's all I need, Foursquare
The image of Buddha in my brain,
Drawing from the countryside the verdant
Fantasm of conception, saying:
"We seen imageries of bush & tree,
Like you, have risen from a mystery,
And the mystery is fantastic,
Unreal, illusion, and sane,
And strange - It is: When ye
Are not born, thou never showest:
When thou art born thou showest,
Thou showest emeralds and pine trees
And thou showest, and if not born
Thou showest naught in white
Dazzling buried in mindless obscure sea
That strange eternity devises to befool,
Befoul and play unfair with Mag
The worshipper and worrier, Man,
Mag, Mad,
    it's all green trees, men
    And dogs of toothbone:
    All shine in the dust,
    All the same Novice Scotia"








Pretty much a regular old poem about pretty much a regular old day.



and now, on to Act II

beat
the sun up this morning
as usual,
moved the cat off my chest
and stumbled into the bathroom,
checked in the mirror,
yep,
it's me,
washed brushed
ascended
the throne
dressed
checked lottery numbers,
shelved
plans for purchase of sports car
got the old Caddy started
and sputtered off to Jim's
for coffee and local newspaper
said hi to all the waitresses
listened
the church goers behind me
talk about the early sermon
paid for my coffee
and left a large tip, it's
why they love me,
went home,
picked up D, drove
to Ihop for Senior Special
and more coffee,
paid for breakfast,
left a large tip, it's
why they love me, then
on to Borders for latte
and the Times and howdy-dos
for the Sunday morning
regulars, talked
about the weather,
"gonna be damn cold today"
for winter,
"gonna be damn hot today"
for springsummerfall,
and that's the weather
and there's not much else
to talk about and didn't
want to anyway cause
the paper's just sitting
there waiting to be read,
not to mention the funnies
from the local paper
peeking comically
from beneath the latest
bullshit from Bushington,
so adios, muchacho,
been nice talking to you,
time to go, pay the bill,
leave a big tip, it's
why they love me,
D to the movies,
me here, catching up,
pulling down the
curtain on
Act I

more excitement in Act II?

nah, not likely,
being contented like the cows
in California,
i don't need no stinking
excitement,
mon








Gwendolyn Brooks was born in 1917 and died near the end of the year in 2000. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1950.

This is a poem from her book Selected Poems, published by HarperCollins in 1999.



The Ballad of Rudolph Reed

Rudolph Reed was oaken.
His wife was oaken too.
And his two good girls and his good little man
Oakened as they grew.

"I am not hungry for berries.
I am not hungry for bread.
But hungry hungry for a house
Where at night a man in bed

"May never hear the plaster
Stir as if in pain.
May never hear the roaches
Falling like fat rain.

"Where never wife and children need
Go blinking through the gloom.
Where every room of many rooms
Will be full of room.

"Oh my home may have its east or west
Or north or south behind it.
All I know is I shall know it,
And fight for it when I find it."

It was in a street of bitter white
That he made his application.
For Randolph Reed was oakener
Than others in the nation.

The agent's steep and steady stare
Corroded to a grin.
Why, you black old, tough old hell of a man,
Move your family in!

Nary a grin grinned Rudolph Reed,
Nary a curse cursed he,
But moved in his House. With his dark little wife,
and his dark little children three.

A neighbor would look, with a yawning eye
That squeezed into a slit.
But the Rudolph Reeds and the children three
Were too joyous to notice it.

For were they not firm in a home of their own
With windows everywhere
And a beautiful banistered stair
And a front yard for flowers and a back yard for grass?

The first night, a rock, big as two fists.
The second, a rock big as three.
But nary a curse cursed Rudolph Reed.
(Though oaken as man could be.)

The third night, a silvery ring of glass.
Patience ached to endure.
But he looked, and lo! small Mabel's blood
Was staining her gaze so pure.

Then up did rise our Rudolph Reed
And pressed the hand of his wife,
And went to the door with a thirty-four
and a beastly butcher knife.

He ran like a mad thing into the night.
And the words in his mouth were stinking.
By the time he had hurt his first white man
He was no longer thinking.

By the time he had hurt his fourth white man
Rudolph Reed was dead.
His neighbors gathered and kicked his corpse.
"Nigger -" his neighbors said.

Small Mabel whimpered all night long,
For calling herself the cause.
Her oak-eyed mother did one thing
But change the bloody gauze.








Here's a children’s poem from San Antonio poet Margaret Mayberry. I first met Margaret at our regular Monday night poetry get together and have enjoyed her readings every week since.



The Sea Shell

If I put you to my ear, I hear the whispering sea,
And the plaintive cry of seagulls flying high and free,
I can hear the hollow echo in the damp dark cave,
And the soft rhythmic whoosh in the undulating wave,

Big shell, little shell, what places have you been?
Do you speak of far off lands and strange things you've seen?
Do you tell of calm seas, silver in the dawn's light?
Of wild storms raging in the darkness of the night?

Pretty shell, pale pink shell, I hold you in my hand,
Delicate shell, white shell, I've plucked you from the sand,
I'll tell you all my secrets if you will tell me yours,
I can tell of sandcastles and you of distant shores,

I like to watch the green waves beneath the frothy foam,
But Mother will be waiting and I have to go on home,
I'll put you in my pocket and you'll go back with me,
When I take you out tomorrow, I shall still hear the sea...








It seems like a good time for another poem from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. I chose a poem by Gerald Locklin.

Locklin has taught English at California State University, Long Beach, since 1965 and is the author of over 125 books and chapbooks or poetry, fiction, and criticism.



Paul Cezanne: The Large Bathers, 1906

it was a good year to look backwards.

to when the woods were a cathedral.

to when the clouds were white as
eden, and the sky angelic azure.

shame was uninvented; men and women
were not yet at war.

world and time were endless, ageless:
we had world and time enough.

the wisdom of water was still with us.

god was the fountainhead:
creation was perfection.

it was a good year, 1906,
not to look ahead.








It occurred to me that I am too much the center of my poetic universe and that I ought to look further afield for inspiration.

So, from the book New American Paintings, here we go.

Maybe a good idea, maybe not.



everything changed that stayed the same
(after Scott Listfield's "It's a Question of Simian Survival" - oil on canvas)

the lady
stands,
torch held high,
leaning slightly toward
the rocks, and
still buried to her waist
in beach sand, but
the actor, gone, now
a place for picnics,
for sand castles,
for jumping in the surf,
for an ice cream truck,
bell ringing,
children running,

unseen

another spaceman

long-armed
bandy-legged
spacesuit
shining
silver
in the red
sun

watching

i fear
for the children








I have mixed feelings about Leonard Cohen, sometimes awed by his brilliance and sometimes the opposite. This poem, from his book Book of Longing strikes me somewhere in the high middle.



Another Poet

Another poet will have to say
how much I love you
I'm too busy now with the Arabian Sea
and its perverse repetitions
of white and grey

I'm tired of telling you
and so are the trees
and so are the deck chairs

Yes, I have given up a lot of things
in the last few minutes
including the great honor
of saying I love you

I've become thin and beautiful again
I shaved off my grandfather's beard
I'm loose in the belt
and tight in the jowl

Crazy young beauties
still covered with the grime
of ashrams and shrines
examine their imagination
in an old man's room

Boys change their lives
in the wake of my gait
anxious to study
elusive realities
under my hypnotic indifference

The brain of the whale
crowns the edge of the water
like a lurid sunset
but all I ever see
is you or You
or you in You
or You in you

confusing to everyone else
but to me
total employment

I introduce
the young to the young
They dance away in misery
while I conspire
with the Arabian Sea
to create
an ugly silence
which gets the ocean
off my back
and more important
lets another poet say
how much I love you








James Lineberger is a retired screenwriter, sometime playwright, and full-time poet. he has eight volumes of poems and a full-length play you check into at http://www.lulu.com/james_lineberger. I'm putting up a link you so you can go there with just one click.

Here's a new poem from James.



broomstraw

there was a time when
it seemed
to point to the future when just to
walk through it
said there were things out there
that would welcome you
like the way when the train went by with its smoke blowing overhead
and the passengers
would look out
their windows and wave
until the day
when me and ivy lee tried to roast potatoes
like they did in boys life
and set the whole field on fire and it
rose up that quick
coming at the houses
and everybody even grandpa was out there
swatting at it with their coats
and throwing buckets of water on it
but when it was
over with and the ground was scorched black
mama said i couldn't play with ivy lee no more cousin
or no cousin
and i sneaked out of the house later and found the potatoes
and carried them
in my shirt
to the creek bank to cool
and ate them skins and all ivy lee's too








Next, I have a poem by Russian poet Anna Akhmatova from her Selected Poems book published by Zephyr Press in 2000. The translation from Russian was by Judiith Hemschemeyer.



Solitude

So many stones have been thrown at me,
That I'm not frightened of them any more,
And the pit has become a solid tower,
Tall among tall towers.
I thank the builders,
May care and sadness pass them by.
From here I'll see the sunrise earlier,
Here the sun's last ray rejoices.
And into the windows of my room
The northern breezes often fly.
And from my hand a dove eats grains of wheat...
As for my unfinished page,
The Muse's tawny hand, divinely calm
And delicate, will finish it.

June 6, 1914
Slepnyovo








Since arriving back home from vacation, it's been, as they say, one thing after another. The biggest, most irritating, most stealing my time from things I'd rather do is this. It's only gotten worse since I wrote the poem last week.



it's just one damn thing after another

he
changed the locks
ran off
with the key
broke
my lawn mower
and left a mess
inside
and out

i'm
a landlord

didn't want to be

never meant to be

but wants and meants
don't mean
nothing
sometime

so there you are
and here i am,
seventy miles from the land
i'm lording,
and gone he went
to parts unknown

and
i'm stuck
with at least two weeks
of mess
cleaning-up to do
when i'd rather be writing
some poems
or eating strawberries in the sun
or visiting the alamo
or shopping for boomerangs
or roller skating
in a buffalo herd
or painting
by numbers
on a felt
canvas
or any other damn thing
than mess cleaning-up








Now I have a poem by Ramon Lopez Velarde, known during his lifetime, 1888-1921, as the "poet of the provinces." The poem is from a selection of his work, Song of the Heart. It's a bilingual book, the original Spanish and the translation, by Margaret Sayers Peden, on facing pages.



The Bell Ringer

The bell ringer told me this morning
I should know it's a bad year for wheat.
That Juan's the beau of a beautiful,
rich cousin. That Susana died.
We're good friends, the bell ringer and I.

He told me about his youthful loves
land his strong voice cracked as he
watched black coffins pass, inspiring
tales of a thousand virtuous acts,
then we talked more about life and death.

"And your wedding, Senor?"
                          "Hush, old man."

"Will it be winter?"
                          "Yes about then...
If you're alive, friend bell ringer,
when Death offers his hand, toll
your bells for my soul, again and again.”








Shawn Nacona Stroud has been with us several times. Here he is, back again, with a new piece for us. Shawn says it previously appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of the Mississippi Crow Magazine



Impressionism

Like water, night cascades
washing daylight away.
My window is canvas -
a sunset by Monet.

Caked viridian hills
embrace the crimson sky
as brush-worked willows reflect
in the river each sigh.

Slack shadows tar the land
paving on what's in sight -
in swirls of purple and blue
buds the burgeoning night.

The prismatic twilight
displayed one hour ago,
displaced by Ursa Major
conceives a dark Van Gogh.








Here's a poem by Lorenzo Thomas from his book Dancing on Main Street, published by Coffee House Press in 2004.

Thomas was born in Panama and grew up in New York City. He is a poet, critic, and professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown. This is his fourth book.



Last Call

In The Odyssey, Book IX, we learn of a fierce battle with the Ciconians on the island of Ismaros:

     From that place we sailed onward much discouraged, but glad to have
     escaped. death, although we had lost good companions. Yet we did not let the
     galleys go off, until we had called thrice on the name of each of our hap-
     less comrades who died in that place.
     - The Odyssey, TR. W. H. D. Rouse

Erwin Rohde, in Psyche, comments: “References to similar callings
upon the dead in later literature make the meaning of such behavior clear. The souls of the dead who have fallen in foreign lands must be 'called'; they will then, if this is properly done, follow the caller to their distant home, where an 'empty grave' awaits them."

     This poem is about veterans of the war in Viet Nam.

     If anybody's carrying a rabbit's foot, hang on to it tight.”
     - Van Johnson in 30 Seconds Over Tokyo

Corned beef sandwiches, water, plenty
Of time to think about the future
You too can grow up to be a square-jawed
American hero, eyes rounding up with recognition
That horror that looked so darn familiar
Really knows you. Grew up in the same town
And memorized the same stupid movies.

It's just us now, huddled in the same apprehension
That whatever is outside this bubble
Is probably no stranger. It gets harder
To swallow, the temperature's rising,
The lies and the half-truths go whistling by

Stand by
For voices blending into stridency
Practiced as alarms
This is the daily danger
We would stay awake,
Missing nothing. Clear the head.
There is some place now.

Just as it materializes on this page
Or fills the ear of the peaceful sleeper

Familiar
As a song that has been on the radio
About six weeks, the smile a little grayer
But the same no-nonsense haircut,
And the words of the heartbroken girl
Making sense. Suddenly, clear the head!

It's me Clothilde!

What are you afraid of? The fires behind us
Are our signatures. Our memories cannot harm us,
Unless we allow them to talk to our friends
And anyone who'd believe them is not really a friend.

Oh poo, she teases.
You have been lax
Don't you remember me
Your pretty little America
Blue and shimmering

Around the corner is a warm and cozy place
Complete with lovable and laughing folks
Waiting in a kind of strange suspenseful animation
For us. To just appear and be ourselves is all
They live for. Anticipation of our beauty
Keeps them lifelike, poised, waiting for your call.
You see? These are our memories.
They will say what you want them to say
And amuse you. They will whine and cower,
Backbite you into the most heartless, unfeeling
Wretch the world has ever known
The most untrustworthiest son of a bitch
The most thankless, loving serf of humanity
Most sweetest, kindest, cut-throat whatever
Until you are happy. See? What are friends for?

Let's get it on before big sister comes.
We dare not admit even suspicions of failure
It is better not to even begin.
And no time wasted on remember when.
I think the truth might be a little prettier
With a bit of stainless steel and neon
Over here. Maybe some glass bricks.
A miniature rain forest in the bath
Sounds a lot better than pipes that drip all night

Our hearts are blessed with an efficient fancy
Corned beef sandwiches, water, plenty
Reasons to be happy in love. So we didn't know
Where we were going, but we are finally here!
A carnival of soft-spoken meanness
Welcomes you to your new refrigerator carton
And honored place among the lowest middle-class

Gee, you look so familiar








Here's another one of my exercises in art depreciation.



until next year
(after Justin Allen's "Red Grill" - oil on panel)

red grill
on a field
of brown leaves

autumn come
and almost gone with summer

red
grill
begins
the long wait
for spring








Sheree Renee Thomas is a writer, editor, small publisher, educator, visual artist, and mother whose work has appeared in numerous publications and literary journals. She is the co-publisher of the literary journal, Anansi: Fiction of the African Diaspora and founder of Wanganegresse Press. A 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Poetry, her fiction and poetry are anthologized in Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology, as well as the literary journals Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, and many literary journals of note.

This poem is from bum rush the page an anthology of performance poets and poetry.



The Road from Khartoum

I have heard their moans and sighs
And seen their tears and I would give every
Drop of blood in my veins to free them.
          - Harriet Tubman

In the day
sand rains
down on us
coarse as camel
hair against
blistered thighs
advancing
from the vast bases
of the Sahara.

In the night
the wind rolls the
grains back
like broken promises
flinging
them through the air
lethal missiles
to settle upon
the hard backs
of this geography:

Aluel Mawien
(girl, age unknown)

Alei Nun Akok
(boy, 14 years old)

Achok Chang Angora
(girl, 2 years old)

Elizabeth Ading Deng
(mother, 25 years)

no longer Mrs. but missing
and presumed dead
one of many thousands gone
and yet
no one speaks
of murder of rape

the desert strangles
more than words
Allah Akbar!
God is Great
armed me
on horses
have no need
for translators

our names
do not represent
women and children
whether
Christian, Muslim, or Ancestral Other
we are all abd
slaves

we are the spoils of a celestial war
and such acts are
the accident of history
celebrated in mosaic structures
jihads old
steeped in memories
   of an eye
       for an eye
         a tooth
             for a tooth
               and 35 US dollars a head

what this journey has taught us:
that foreign policy is UNclean
teeth biting down
on black throats, ripe as dates
that pain is fragrant
as the oiled skin of concubines
that truth can be stolen
hidden in oil drums shipped to Canada
that following the north star will not lead us to freedom
that some Talismans do not protect but exploit
that excuses are ubiquitous
as cheap
and as plentiful
expendable
as human labor

These truths the sun reflects
illuminating the harsh tender
moments in this, our third republic
demanding that every word must conjure
while the sands of rains
pour down on us
paving the road from Khartoum
to freedom.








Here's a timely spring poem from Sara Zang. We haven't heard from Sara in a while. She's busy, no doubt, as administrator of The Peaceful Pub poetry forum.



Waiting for April

Grass and trees
have thinned to wispy thoughts
of Spring. How red the rose
of memory, how sweet the song
that's not quite sung,
but waits like stars
on quiet nights
to drench the corners
of your room
with light,
and fill your heart
with magic.








I've had Notes from the Castle, a collection of poems by Howard Moss, almost as long as I've been doing "Here and Now" but only used his poems a couple of times.

Moss was poetry editor of The New Yorker for many years, beginning in 1948. Before that, he was an instructor of English at Vassar College. His style is kind of dry, which might be why I've tended to pass him by when picking the poems for the week.

This is a good one, though.



At the Cafe

At the Cafe, at an outdoor table
Fronting the last of the puppet shows,
We have come to sip a bit of brandy
And watch the rapidly descending evening.
Violinists scrape the bow of air,
Arguments begin and finish soon,
As if philosophy were running a cafe
Where nothing is served but old ideas;
tensed against the wine-soaked washrag
Of the sky the trees erect themselves
In the last small oblivion of lights;
Talk grows animated...someone screams...
This passes, these days, for the Bohemian.
Still, the knees of two bright things
Are touching...Eveyone's lost the theme:
What is the mind compared to it,
To feeling's theatre, always in flames,
On the stage, its aging, ludicrous opera
Still faintly hard among the ruins?








A lot of stuff's been coming down in the past couple of weeks. I wouldn't say I'm overwhelmed, but I am maybe at five or six on the ol' whelm-o-meter.

All this at a time when I try hard to keep things simple in my life, only to be taught again and again that what I want doesn't count for much.

This poem is an attempt at a new form for me. I don't know what the form is called and don't know the rules to it. In fact, I don't know much of anything about the form except that Thane Zander does them really well and I'd like to try one too.



me too

I want to minimize complications, avoid entanglement, find equilibrium, bring to my life a simple balance in creative tranquility. So this guy comes to me with this deal, real estate, invest and manage, double you money in six years. He's a hustler, buying and selling houses, increasing his wealth, paying off a new sports car, making a name and place for himself. And he's a friend, a young guy, in his prime. For him, six years is just an afternoon on a long and busy calendar. He doesn't see that for me, it might be the rest of my life.

when i was
young
i said everyone
dies
and felt brave
for facing the grim reality
of life
head on,
while in the back of my mind
also saying,
but
not me

i know better now
and when i say
everyone dies
i mean not just
you,
but me as well








Well, that's it for this week. Closing on little bit of a down note, but I'm right at my 6,000 word limit, so we'll just live with it.

Until next week, remember, all of the work presented on this blog remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.

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40-Acre Wood Outlet Mall - Opening Soon   Friday, March 14, 2008

Can't say it's good to be back from our little Colorado trip. I have two work projects starting up in a week that will keep me out of the leisure class for about two months and a rental property mess to clean up in the time I have left before before reporting for misery....I mean duty.

So it's time for me to quit complaining and get on with the show.








The first poem this week is by Indian poet Sudeep Sen. It is a description of a meeting with South African poet and academic Stephen Gray. It is from Sen's book Postmarked India, New and Selected Poems.

Also a poet and academic, Sen was born in New Delhi in 1964 and studied literature there and in the United States. He has an MS from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He has published several poetry collections and is read worldwide.



97 6th Avenue, Mayfair

Under the strong shaft of the Johannesburg sun,
  you sit in the old chair of your study, stroking
your cat, tiding the unsaid loneliness with the fingers

  that know the beauty of rhythm, enacted variously
under arc-lights and real light. In this historic
  sprawling, book-lined home, you re-script for me

the Hottentot tale, repairing Apollo Cafe
  in this indeterminate season of violence, some of which
appears quietly in the diary columns in London,

  the vicissitudes of the state. Across hemispheres,
both North and East, I carry your thoughts,
  replay The Poet Speaks, hearing the gently cadence

of your voice, your voice that reverberates
  even now, just as strongly as it did from behind
the posters at The Market Theatre, listing your cast.

  The scent of the violet plant you hung on the porch,
still spreads, the sure solidity of an unstated friend:
  I return to England after half a year away,

first in South Africa and then in India, to your card
  and the SABC tape, to be reassured once again that
in time of darkness, the war child, born of man

  can still be resurrected, perhaps with a small prayer,
a simple one invoking familiar things: the preserved
  ticket stubs of Hottentot Venus, the fragrance

of uncared for weeds, the hand-woven Oriyan fabric,
  your inscriptions on the title pages, and
the reiterated rhymes at University of Witwatersrand.








We returned from our mountain vacation to a wonderful day of rain, the first significant rain since mid-October.



rain today

rain today
glorious rain
today

i hear
the creek
rising
running high
and running
fast

glorious
rain today

i hear
the creek rising

running








Charles Entrekin is an Alabama native who earned his Bachlor of Arts degree at Birmingham Southern College. He was a graduate student in philosophy at Vanderbilt University and the University of Alabama and completed an M.F.A. degree in Creative Writing at the University of Montana. He was one of the founders of the Berkeley Poets Cooperative and has taught at various colleges and universities.

Entrekin is also a founder and partner of a computer consulting firm in San Francisco.

This poem is from his book In This Hour.



Meditation At Point Reyes

Sir William Occam,
from whom we get the term,
Occam's razor, showed us how
to be efficient in our reasoning,
showed us the errors in Saint Thomas Aquinas,
on Aristotle and the Church...

Accused of heresy,
he fled on horseback, and
died of the plague in Italy.

We sit on a promontory,
flat surface of sheer black rock;
watch the heavy pound of surf,
the systalic violence in wave and ocean roar.
Higher up, not twenty feet away,
orange-red flowers flutter above the canyon's shore.
Ice plants are magnified in morning light.

In the fourteenth century,
the world shuddered and knew
that Occam was right,
that once again faith and reason
lived in separate camps,
like step sisters who would not
be reconciled.

End of the twentieth century,
computers track the stars, pulsars,
equidistant twin suns in nova,
trapped in a gravity well,
and no one reconciled.

Today, below the cliffs
we stand at the western most point,
watch as seals appear, lazily
navigate the brutal ocean wave
and rock of tidal flux.
To see it so easily done takes the breath;
the sea made suddenly serene.








Now, here's another masterwork of in-the-moment poetry from our New Zealand friend, Thane Zander



A Day in the Life Of...

It's not any old Bus. No. It's a Japanese Import, runs on smelly diesel and choking the environment with it's endless emissions. I have to take this bus, against my better judgment, as it's the only means I have to my disposal to get into the University. I suck in a truckload of fresh air as I board it, and for the rest of the journey I exhale slowly. Bear in mind this trip takes twenty five minutes. Yup, Blue...

the colour of her top
she's too young for my eyes
but nonetheless
I can watch with a keen eye
she sees me looking at her
a silly giggle erupts
the campus suddenly stops
the world stops
she moves on
I too, run away.

The Massey Bus from Palmerston North bus depot is a "clean" bus. It uses biofuel and the atmosphere around the exhaust pipe is relatively clear. No need to suck in deep breaths for this one. I watch the road eat away behind us, the river flow under as we navigate the bridge, the onset of park-like settings and tall buildings poking above them. We enter the slow moving road zone, the start of the University proper. I admire one with a dark top....

she smiles,
in her Japanese way
her eyes avert
as is protocol,
the taste of sushi
wet on her lips,
she tucks her folders
under the other arm,
and moves on to another class,
I settle into a steady trot
looking this way,
observing that,
seeing groups chatting
as if class isn't enough,
the Sudanese Bus driver
passes by going the other way
his attention to the road,
mine to another young cutie,
this university thing
is doing my head in,
I stop at the Registry
all is well, I fit in
despite a biker beard
and Bulldog T shirt.

The road back resembles the road there, but in reverse. I'm no longer espying young ladies, tall trees, and dirty buses (for now). I'm concentrating on the work at hand, the papers passed in for administering. I feel a whole lot better (and not just because it's another clean bus), the sights well passed and forgotten, the knowledge I won't have to face that everyday of the campus year. Extramurally for me all the way.

The lady with the pram,
needing my attention,
the pram heavy, I smile
lift it for her
and take it off the bus,
my good deed for the day,
now sit and wait for my bus,
the dirty bus,
Japanese Import bus,
I chat with an old Maori man
we share whakapapa,
seems we have a lot in common,
the bus arrives, stinking
I palm the bus driver
a couple of bucks
and sit back gasping
as truckloads of evil fumes
make their way
through the back windows,
I detrain at the Golf Course
wave the stinking bus away
his last laugh
to cough in my face,
I walk home
deeds done
happy.

The staff welcome me home, ask if I had a good day, I just smile and say "great thanks" and meander up to my room. You'd think after a seriously testing day the internet would behave itself. Nope, not a chance. I sit here writing this as I can't get access and when I do it's slower than ten snails playing hopscotch. Wish me luck.








I added two books to my bookshelf this week. One is Incredible Good Fortune, a book of poems by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Born in 1929, Le Guin has written novels, poetry, children's books, essays, and short stories, most notably in the fantasy and science fiction genres.

She was first published in the 1960s. She has received several Hugo and Nebula awards, and was awarded the Gandalf Grand Master award in 1979 and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award in 2003. Her novel The Farthest Shore won the National Book Award for Children's Books in 1973.



The Forsaken Shepherdess

I love to sit beside the stream
that runs so fast and fiery,
setting the forest trees aflame
with the joy of its desiring.

I watch the fishes of the stream,
the blinding trout, the blazing carp,
and hear its music go and come,
plucking the incandescent harp.

I'll sit beside the lava stream
as my lambs leap and gambol
like molten clouds at sunset time,
flocking crimson, fleeting nimble.

I'll pipe my tune of joy and shame,
a simple shepherdess alone,
while slower, blacker runs the stream
and all the lowlands turn to stone.


The Lorelei to Heinrich Heine

I don't know why I am so sad.
I watch the river ships go by
and see a harmless sailor lad
and call him and he comes to me
into my arms to die
and we sink down and down
he to drown, not I,

for what I breathe is not the air
when I sit lonely in the sun
and comb my hair and comb my hair
till there comes by another one,
some boy a mother had,
to sink with me and die.
O why am I so sad?








I had some interesting experiences while doing my military service, among them, more fun than interesting, I guess, was studying the Russian language for nearly a year at Indiana University. We were taught by Russian immigrants, though the designation they would consider more appropriate is something "refugees in exile." Reading of Fidel Castro's "retirement" reminded me me of some those who attempted to teach us, those who waited, not just for an individual leader to become weakened and die, but for a whole philosophical system and the society it controlled to collapse. They kept the faith, even those 70 years in exile. It finally came, just like they knew it would, only 20 years too late for them.

I wrote this in mid-february and don't remember if I used it here. One of the things I should do, but don’t, is keep a record of what I use here. But, like I said, I don't, depending on a very slippery memory instead.



in 1966, still waiting to go home

now,
still tall and straight,
though very old,
bald head
all angles and planes
and scars
where a bullet
went in and through,
every rough word
a command

then,
a young officer
in the Czar's army,
defeated,
a refugee in Algiers,
taking his military skills
to the French Foreign Legion,
a refugee again
after
the battle of Algiers,
moving
from country to country,
finally to the United States,
contemptuous,
like the great gulag moralist
who would come later,
of everything American,
the softness, the decadence,
the ignorance of the harsh world outside,
surviving,
waiting for the inevitable collapse
of the Soviet state, the communist
more decadent in their evil
then even the Americans,
waiting
for the day
he could go home,
a survivor, a winner in the end,
he knew, any day, soon,
reduced,
at the end of his long life,
to teaching the great Russian language
to American soldiers, who,
with their softness
and disrespect
and lackadaisical commitment
to order and discipline,
shamed
the soldier traditions
he had lived for since his first days
as a child-cadet, born, trained,
to serve the Russian imperial state

still waiting,
certain,
the day of liberation would come

if not today,
tomorrow








The second addition to my bookshelf this week is Song, a book of poems by Brigit Pegreen Kelly. The book, published by Boa Editions Ltd., was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets.

Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California in 1951. At the time the book was published, she taught in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and in the Warren Wilson College M.F.A. program for writers.



Petition

These are the long weeks. The weeks
Of waiting. Let them be
Longer. Let the days smolder
Like the peat slung
In plastic sacks by the greenhouse
And let the seedlings not rush
Into growth but climb the air slowly
As if it were a ladder,
One small foot at a time.
Let the fetid smell of bone meal
Be the body unlocking
As the river does, slowing to a hazy laze
That pulls the boaters in
And makes the fish rise up. And
As the wide-wheeled yellow tractors
Roll along the highway,
Stalling traffic in their wakes,
And the dust from the playing fields
Settles over us like pollen,
Like the balls dropping softly
Into our mitts, let
The willow's love of water -
Its dark and beaded rain -
Be the only storm we long for.








It's been a while since anything by Gary Blankenship has appeared here. To remedy that, here's a piece from his first book, A River Transformed: Wang Wei's River Wang Poems as Inspiration.

This is a wonderful book. Although Gary continues to write excellent poems, the poems from this book will remain special to me, for their elegance and for their beauty.

You can contact Gary through the link on the right. If he has any books left to sell, I recommend them to you highly.



Adrift on the River

              (After Wang Wei's North Hill)

There is no color; the mountains white;
the valley thick with fog and cry of geese.
Once scarlet flowed across the green,
and green faded to yellow, gold and brown.

The forest black against winter's sky,
the river dark with the shade of naked trees,
every gray and masked bird as silent
as clouds heavy with the season's cold crop.

Pale as quiet nights, you tremble
as the last petal falls to an early frost.
Worry not, there will be other springs,
there will be other journeys after this.

I have lost our oars and whittle new
from oak leaves drifting past red hills.








I've never done this before, but when I started "Here and Now" I said it would be about things I like. Well, there was a column in our local newspaper, the San Antonio Express-News that I didn't just like, I loved it.

The column was by regular Express-News writer Cary Clack and it was in response to former vice-presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro's comment about how the only reason Barack Obama is where he is right now is because he's a black man.

The column is everything a great newspaper column ought to be, timely, sharp as a knife in its response when famous people say foolish things and hilarious in the reading.

Here it is.



Ferraro is so, uh, insightful

Last week, Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run as a major party's vice-presidential candidate and a fundraiser for Sen. Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, had some perceptive things to say about Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama.

"If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," Ferraro told a California newspaper. "And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be what he is. And the country is caught up in the concept."

It should also be noted that if Obama were a woman, he would be his sister's children's aunt. It's also true that had Obama been born on Nov. 14, 1896, as Mamie Doud, and married Dwight David Eisenhower, he would have been Mamie Eisenhower.

Ferraro's thesis that Obama is lucky to be black is correct. For black men in the United States life has been a 289-year-long crystal staircase. It's been an experience akin to winning the Mega Millions lottery once a week.

I can understand people being jealous at all of the good fortune that has been showered upon black men. At least two of my great-great-grandfathers were white men and it pains me when I think of all of the suffering and injustices that they endured. But that's when I give thanks for being lucky enough to be a black man without a problem in the world, confident in the knowledge that all good things have come my way because of that fortunate meeting of ethnicity and gender.

Ferraro understands that in the history of the United States, white men have never been in a position to be the frontrunner for their party's nomination for president. The luck of being a black man was also instrumental in the successes of the administrations of President Jesse Jackson, President Alan Keyes and President Al Sharpton.

Now it can be argued that Ferraro was lucky to have been a woman when Walter Mondale chose her to be his running mate. Had she instead been a man, she would have simply been another white male running for vice president. Despite their abysmal failure at getting elected president, white males have had stunning success in being elected vice president.

The Ferraro theory of ethnicity as destiny holds true in all professions throughout the decades. Look at the incomparable Babe Ruth. Had he been lucky enough to be born a black man, all of his home runs would have been hit in the Negro Leagues. In other words, had Ruth been lucky enough to have been born a black man, he would have been Josh Gibson, who hit all of his home runs in the Negro Leagues.

If the great black writer Richard Wright hadn't been lucky enough to be a black male, he would have had to change the title of his classic autobiography, "Black Boy."

After Ferraro's comments were circulated and criticized, she told the same California newspaper, on Tuesday, that she was being "attacked because I'm white. How's that?"

That's yet another injustice, since black men lucky enough to be born black men can say and do anything without being criticized.

So Ferraro is right. Obama's lucky to be black and that and only that is from where his success flows. And now that he's so lucky that he has Secret Service protection, he doesn't have to worry about having to catch a cab.








OK, I admit it. I've been reading the Times science section again. And here's the result.



the end is in sight

i wouldn't want
you
to lose any sleep
over this,
but you should
know

the end
is in sight

it will go
something
like this

the sun
will grow to 10% brighter

life will become
more and more
uncomfortable
until
finally
impossible
as the oceans
boil away
in a massive
hiss
of steam
rising

eventually
stable orbit will be lost
and we will fall
into the
expanding
fire

a cinder
blowing
in the solar winds
of the dying sun

all this
in about
7.59 billion years
give or take
a billion
or so

don't
make any long term
plans

it is
probably
unavoidable








My next piece is by Susan Holahan from her book Sister Betty Reads the Whole You. The book was published by Giggs Smith, Publisher in 1998.

With a PhD. n English and a law degree from Yale, Holahan has taught writing at Yale and the University of Rochester, practiced law in Connecticut, worked as an editor at Newsday and the Yale University Press. She has published poetry in many periodicals, as well as essays, book reviews, columns, restaurant reviews and feature stories of all kinds. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Every parent has a story like this.



Every Minute You Worry

Every public door you pull this week
    bares the face of a four-year-old,
blond hair to her waist. Why leave a four-

    year-old all that to tangle like
Isadora's scarf? Kid wears the full-
    toothed blurry smile of a hostess

who doesn't trust her party. Tooling
    around on a pink and white big-
wheel, she must've been picked up after

    after supper, near garden apartments
where her mother lives. Wherever her
    father lives he's not a suspect.

Her mother didn't see this kid from
    when? The broken home, it's riven
roof to basement. At four my kid wasn't

    out alone: I wasn't single
when he was four. At seven, though, he
    walked to school three blocks alone. When

he was nine, I drove three hours a day
    to work. One afternoon I came
back early and he wasn't there. No

    note on the kitchen table. Then
my home was broken. With him gone all
    bets were off. Kill yourself now, I

thought, it that's thinking, Why wait around
    for cops to bring his body? An-
other hour and my friend had him

    back, bubbling. She cried. I snarled, Go
away. For good. How forgive her for
    failing to understand what I

was guilty of; how heavy, how you
    hardly breathe, having your own your
only child living on you alone.








It's always a pleasure to have Christopher George back with us.

Chris was born in Liverpool, England in 1948 and first emigrated to the United States with his parents in 1955. He went back to Liverpool for a while, living with his grandparents while attending Rose Lane and Quarry Bank Schools. Chris returned to the U.S.A. in 1968 and has lived there ever since. He now lives in Baltimore, Maryland, near Johns Hopkins University with his wife Donna and two cats.

Chris's poetry has appeared in many on-line and print literary journals. He is the Editor of Desert Moon Review and an editor at Writer's Block Poetry Workshop. He is coeditor, with Jim Doss, of the electronic and print magazine Loch Raven Review. Chris also has a blog you can access by clicking on the link on the right.

He is also the lyricist for Jack - The Musicall, written with French composer Erik Sitbon (http://www.jack-themusical.com/).

Here three of Chris' newest pieces.



To the Blue Jay Furiously Digging
in the Smithsonian Rose Garden

You pay me no mind as I detour
to avoid workers blowing mulch into

a flowerbed on Independence Avenue:
you insistently jab your beak-arrow

into the ground, as I observe - bold
harlequin! Then you extract a pearl,

a wriggling grub you take airborne
to consume in an elm on the Mall.



The Wrong Zipper

I apologize, my love, I unzipped
the wrong zipper and everything

tumbled out, one sensation led
to another, and now we find
ourselves where we are -
none the wiser but fulfilled,
in a terrible fix, one more glitch.



Seen from a Train

A doe and two fawns
bound over the grass
white tails raised high








My next poem is by Tracie Morris. It's from The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry.



Morris is a multidisciplinary poet who has worked in theater, dance, music and film. She has toured extensively throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, Africa and Asia. Primarily known as a "musical poet," Tracie has worked with an extensive range of internationally recognized musicians and other artists. She has participated in a dozen recording projects. Her sound poetry has most recently been featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

She is the recipient of numerous awards for poetry and is the author of two poetry collections, Intermission and Chap-T-her Woman.

She has delivered academic papers at the New York University's "Soul: Black Power, Politics and Pleasure Conference", The Hemispheric Conference in Lima, Peru, "The Langston Hughes Centenary Conference" at Yale University, "Poetry and the Public Sphere" at Rutgers University and the African-American Poetry Conference for the Poetry Society of America.

As a writer, Morris' poetry has been anthologized in many literary magazines, newspapers and books.

Tracie holds degrees from Hunter College and New York University. She also holds certificates from the Cave Canem Summer Institute and the Hemispheric Institute of NYU. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.



Project Princess

Teeny feet rock layered double socks
Popping side piping of
many colored loose lace-ups
Racing toe, keeps up with the fancy free gear,
slick slide, just pressed, recently weaved hair.

Jean oversized bely her hip, black, thighs have made guys sigh
for milleni-year.

Topped by an attractive jacket
her suit's not for flacking, flunkies, junkies or punk homies on the stroll.

Hands the mobile thrones of today's urban goddess
Clinking rings link dragon fingers no need to be modest.

One or two gap teeth coolin'
sport gold initials
Doubt you get to her name
Check from the side,
please chill.

Multidimensional shrimp earrings
frame her cinnamon face

Crimson with a compliment if a
comment hits the right place

Don't step to the plate with datelines from '88
Spare your simple, fragile feelings with same sense that you came

Color woman variation reworks the french twist
Crinkle-cut platinum frosted bangs from a spray can's mist

Never dissed, she insists: "No you can't touch this."
And, if pissed, bedecked fist stops boys who must persist.

She's the one. Give her some. Under fire. Smoking gun. Of which songs
   are sung, raps are spun, bells are rung, rocked, pistols cocked,
unwanted advances blocked, well-stacked she's jock. It's all about you
girl. You go on. Don't you dare stop.








This is a rant I wrote last week after spending roughly five hours trying to get my last issue to post.

Not great poetry, but it did make me feel better after it was done.



help!!!

can
someone
tell me exactly
i mean exactly
how much frustration
we are required to endure
before we are empowered
to pull out our handy
38 police special
and shoot
the goddamn machine
square
between
it's cursor blinks
i mean
damnit
i'm a writer
my mind is seduced
by a higher calling
i'm not supposed
to know
about this stuff
help desk!!!
i mean
give me a break
i get as much help
from these people
as a pork chop
at an alkaida convention
"fuck you
and the horse you rode in on"
that's what they ought to call it
if truth in advertising
were of any importance to them
just never name them
"help"
although
"never help'
might work
too








At mid-20th century, Frank Yerby was one of the most popular writers of historical fiction in the United States, huge market at the time. Despite that, I'll bet 75 percent of his readers didn't know he was African-American. I started reading his swashbucklers when I was about 13 and I didn't.

Neither did I know that he was a very fine poet.

This poem is from the anthology American Negro Poetry, first compiled and published by Arna Botemps in 1963 and revised and updated periodically since. The edition I'm pulling from was published in 1974.



You are a Part of Me

You are a part of me. I don not know
By what slow chemistry you first became
A vital fiber of my being. Go
Beyond the rim of time or space, the same
Inflections of your voice will sing their way
Into the depths of my mind still. Your hair
Will gleam as bright, the artless play
Of word and glance, gesture and the fair
Young fingers waving, have too deeply etched
The pattern of your soul on mine. Forget
Me quickly as a laughing picture sketched
On water, I shall never know regret
Knowing no magic ever can set free
That part of you that is a part of me.








The next poem is by Steve Williams, from his book Skin Stretched Around the Hollow.

Steve currently lives in Portland, Oregon. He is co-administrator of the on-line poetry workshop Wild Poetry Forum.



Fate

Evergreens are taken by hewn men
who float the river on thumping rafts;
rough boots tread the spinning bark,
the logs run the men.

Tri-masts define deep ships,
anchor taut sails. As each prow
surges trough swell and spray,
the sea sails the ship.
She circumnavigates each day,
body seismographs the hours,
ink of sweat stains the mast,
She causes passage of the day.

Her breath is cool on molten glass
rotating on iron rod,
agate brass woven from behind
cool eyes, memory of glass

bottle is wide mouthed, soft bellied;
opal glow acquiesces to kelp-tinged clear;
a sunset rainbow that surrenders
to the broken dusk belly

of her hull that is pushed, precedes prow
through mouth of bottle. Common string
pulls masts upright, above her bronze body,
twisted hair, the varnished woman of the prow.








Here's a short piece by Robert Bly from Good Poems for Hard Times, put together by Garrison Keillor from his regular feature on National Public Radio, The Writer's Almanac.



Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

It is cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in a snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.








And now another short piece from Good Poems for Hard Times, this one by Carl Sandburg.



Still Life

Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up to ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops,
        swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the
        post office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black
        wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his
        place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on
        a dark night when lovers pass whispering.








And here's a last one from Good Books for Hard Times, author unknown. I couldn't pass it up.



Carnation Milk

Carnation Milk is the best in the land;
Here I sit with a can in my hand -
No tits to pull, no hay to pitch,
You just punch a hole in the son of a bitch.








It's terrible, I take a week off and can't remember which poems I've used and which I haven't.
Either way, here's this one.

Litter conditions really do seem much worse than usual this year. But I feel better about it than I did before I went to Colorado and saw what all was being uncovered as the snow melted.



out of sight

trash lines the roadway
and along the sides
of the creek,
soda cans
milk cartons
plastic grocery bags
white bags
with mcdonald's
golden arch
or red and white
whataburger
stripes,
just trash
like white flags
everywhere you drive
or walk in this neighborhood

i've never seen it this bad before

maybe it's lack of rain
to take our garbage
out to sea,
down the creeks
to the river
that washes all
that comes to it
out to some deep
ocean abyss

out of sight

out
of mind








So far, I've kept this week's wanderings within bounds lengthwise, so I'm going to quit while I'm ahead.

Come back next week for more "Here and Now" poetry and inane introductions. In the meantime, remember, all of the work presented here remains the property of its creators. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.

1 Comments:

at 11:32 PM  Alice Folkart said...

Allen, wonderful issue - I LOVE the Carnation Milk poem, which was not used by the Carnation company for advertising for obvious reasons. Too bad. The photos - a lot to be said for black and white - that road in the rain, undulations of the world and the telephone poles - that's a poem in itself.

Won't comment on yours or Mr. Zanders' poems, as I have already done so elsewhere, but they are wonderful - especially like your arm poem.

Bly, Chris George, the Sandburg, Tracie morris - wish I could write like that/see like that, LeGuin - ever read her book on writing - Steering the Craft? Very nice. And, Susan Holahan - been there, done that, felt that. Very tough. And finally - the Ferraro piece. I have friends in New York with fairly intimate knowledge of the Ferraro dynasty and just be glad that she failed. What an.... Oh well, I'm a lady, so won't comment. But, as you promised, very funny in a warped way. Great commentator.

That's it. Well done. Enjoyed.
Alice Folkart

Post a Comment

Cold Dog Soup and Rainbow Pie   Sunday, March 09, 2008

III.3.2.



This issue is late by a couple of days (and I hate being late for anything, any time, anywhere) because of a posting problem it took me a minute and a half to fix, after spending 6 hours over 2 days trying to figure out what the problem was. I suggest a mass protest against "help" stations who do absolutely nothing to help, the rule rather than the exception. I don't understand the fear of actually having employees communicate with customers, rather than requiring the customer to figure out how to ask exactly the right question in exactly the right way.

Anyway, rant over. On with the show.



Welcome back to "Here and Now."

We were gone a week and a half, enjoying a most excellent break, most of it in Durango, Colorado. It was a great trip, just one snow-day, and the rest brisk and clear under blue skies. We visited Mesa Verde, where we hadn't been in 25 or so years and went to Silverton, which we do every couple of years, either for the train ride or just for the drive.

But mostly we just hung out.

I wrote some poems and took some pictures along the way. You'll see them here, along with some great poetry from some poets you know and some you don't.

Oh, I don't want to forget - if you find yourself in Durango (an all-round excellent place to find yourself), stop in and chat with Ann Perkins-Parrott, the friendly proprietor of The Bookcase at 601 E. 2nd Avenue where you can choose from a large selection of used and out-of-print books, as well as antiques, comics, posters, CD's and DVD's. You can also, if you're of a mind to, buy my book, "Seven Beats a Second," there.








I had a 40%-off cupon for Borders a couple of weeks ago, so actually sprung for a new, as in fresh from the book factory, book. The book is Selected Poems, 1931-2004 by Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz. The book was published by Harper Collins in 2006.

Milosz was born in 1911 in Lithuania. He survived World War II, publishing in the underground press. After the war he was stationed in New York, Washington and Paris as cultural attache from Poland. He defected to France in 1951, and in 1960 he took a position at the University of California at Berkeley. Although his work was banned in Poland at the time, he won the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 2004 in Krakow.

The poems in the book were selected by Robert Hass, professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and former Poet Laureate of the United States.



Theodicy

No, itr won't do, my sweet theologians.
Desire will not save the morality of God.
If he created beings able to choose between good and evil,
And they chose, and the world lies in iniquity,
Nevertheless, there is pain, and the undeserved torture of creatures,
Which would find its explanation only by assuming
The existence of an archetypal Paradise
And a pre-human downfall so grave
That the world of matter received its shape from diabolic power.


Incantation

Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas Truth and Justice
in capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above all things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
from the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.

Berkeley, 1968


The City

The city exulted, all in flowers.
Soon it will end: a fashion, a phase, the epoch life.
The terror and sweetness of final dissolution.
Let the bombs fall without delay.








Here's the first of my poems from our time off.

D had flown to El Paso on business. Reba and I were met her there where she joined us for the drive, first to Albuquerque, then to Durango.



a long day

San Antonio to El Paso,
558 miles,
but with a wide-open interstate
and a posted speed limit
of 80 miles an hour,
my little rented Rav 4
puts the miles behind us

***

through the hill country,
cedar covered limestone hills,
think bubbles
in a boiling pot,
right up next to each other,
bumping up on each other,
steep ravines
and dry creek beds
winding between the hills

***

past Kerrville and Junction
into a new geology
higher hills,
longer,
stretching across
wide valleys
like waves on a slow sea

***

past Sonora,
five or ten miles on either side of Ozona,
atop a high mesa
where everything seems dead or dying,
field grass low to the ground, hugging the earth
like a burrowing creature trying
to hide underground,
above,
chest high
bushes, black limbs
that never have leaves,
not like the burned areas we've passed,
where high winds and dry weather,
have left black scortch
on either side of the road,
not like that,
but like dry sticks, painted black
and stuck in the ground like some
gothic doom art,
a warning posed as art,

some dark passing

***

a gradual descent
to Fort Stockton,
with mesas along the way
on either side, the ones of the north side
lined with hundreds of wind turbines
turning slowly in even the lightest wind

***

climbing again
past Fort Stockton,
the Davis Mountains a shadow
on the southwest horizon, drawing
close, taking greater definition
until, passing Balmorhea to Van Horn they
are an arch around us
and we are cupped in their embrace

until we navigate their foothills

***

finally Sierra Blanca where
the highway begins to flatten out
and the caliche and pebbled rock
that has surrounded us becomes
more and more sandy
until it is desert sand around us
that flows into El Paso,


***

Reba enjoys the trip,
sleeping in the back on her bed,
coming up front now and then
to check, like D does, that I'm still awake

***

we stop at every rest area
and I let her run -
they say dogs see and learn about
the world primarily through their nose,
so for Reba each stop a new library
with a world of new smells and messages
from others from others
of her canine kind

***

I put a leash on her only once, when,
at a roadside rest area,
I noticed ten or fifteen jackrabbits
with long ears and as many pups
as there were adults and I knew
if Reba saw even one, I'd be chasing
her through several hundred thousand acres
of west Texas badlands

I slipped the leash on
and quickly walked the other way
and she never saw
the rabbits
passing right behind her

***

each stop as we traveled west
seemed to grow bigger patches
of bullhead thorns
and by the last stop the thorns
were everywhere,
even on the street, and Reba
was trying to limp with three feet
in the air so I picked her up
and carried her to the car
and we drove on

***

finally El Paso
as the sun sets behind mountains in Mexico,
half a million people settling in
for the night,
and on the other side
of the Rio Grande,
3 million more
in Cuidad Juarez, an ocean
of yellow lights spread across
the desert and up the mountain side








Now, here's early Lawrence Ferlinghetti from A Coney Island of the Mind, in its seventh printing by New Directions Paperbook in 1958.



Autobiography

I am leading a quiet life
in Mike's Place every day
watching the champs
of the Dante Billiard parlor
and the French pinball addicts.
I am leading a quiet life
on lower East Broadway.
I am an American.
I was an American boy.
I read the American Boy Magazine
and became a boy scout
in the suburbs.
I thought I was Tom Sawyer
catching crayfish in the Bronx River
and imagining the Mississippi.
I had a baseball mitt
and an American Flyer bike.
I delivered the Woman's Home companion
at five in the afternoon
or the Herald Trib
at five in the morning.
I still can hear the paper thump
on lost porches.
I had an unhappy childhood.
I saw Lindberg land.
I looked homeward
and saw no angel.
I got caught stealing pencils
from the Five and Ten Cent Store
the same month I made Eagle Scout.
I chopped trees for the CCC
and sat on them.
landed in Normandy
in a rowboat that turned over.
I have seen the educated armies
on the beach at Dover.
I have seen Egyptian pilots in purple clouds
shopkeepers rolling up their blinds
at midday
potato salad and dandelions
at anarchist picnics.
I am reading "Lorna Doone"
and a life of John Most
terror of the industrialist
a bomb on his desk at all times.
I have seen the garbagemen parade
in the Columbus Day Parade
behind the glib
farting trumpeters.
I have not been out to the Cloisters
in a long time
nor to the Tuileries
but I still keep thinking
of going.
I have seen the garbagemen parade
when itt was snowing.
I have eaten hotdogs in ballparks.
I have heard the Gettysburg Address
and the Ginsberg Address.
I like it here
and I won't go back
where I came from.
I too have ridden boxcars boxcars boxcars.
I have traveled among unknown men.
I have been in Asia
with Noah in the Ark.
I was in India
when Rome was built.
I have been in the Manger
with an Ass.
I have seen the Eternal distributor
from a White Hill
in south San Francisco
and the Laughing Woman at Loona Park
outside the Fun House
in a great rainstorm
still laughing.
I have heard the sound of revelry
by night.
I have wandered lonely
in a crowd.
I am leading a quiet life
outside of Mike's Place every day
watching the world walk by
in its curious shoes.
I once started out
to walk around the world
but ended up in Brooklyn.
I have engaged in silence
exile and cunning.
I flew too near the sun
and my wax wings fell off.
I am looking for my Old Man
whom I never knew.
I am looking for the Lost Leader
with whom I flew.
Young me should be explorers.
Home is where one starts from.
But Mother never told me
there'd be scenes like this.
Womb-weary
I rest
I have traveled.
I have seen goof city.
I have seen the mass mess.
I have heard Kid Ory cry.
I have heard a trombone preach.
I have heard Debussy
strained thru a sheet.
I have slept in a hundred islands
where books were trees.
I heard the birds
that sound like bells.
I have worn grey flannel trousers
and walked upon the beach of hell.
I have dwelt in a hundred cities
where trees were books.
What subways what taxis what cafes!
What women with blind breasts
limbs lost among skyscrappers!
I have seen tdhe statues of heroes
ar carrefours.
Danton weeping at a metro entrance
Columbus in Barcelona
point Westward up the Ramblas
toward the American Express
Lincoln in his stony chair
And a great Stone Face
in North Dakota.
I know that Columbus
did not invent American.
I have heard a hundred housebroken Ezra Pounds.
They should all be freed.
It is long since I was a herdsman.
I am leading a quiet life
in Mike's Place every day
reading the classified columns.
I have read the Reader's Digest
from cover to cover
and noted the close identification
of the United States and the Promised Land
where every coin is marked
In God We Trust
but the dollar bills do not have it
being gods unto themselves.
I read the Want Ads daily
looking for a stone a leaf
an unfound door.
I hear America singing
in the Yellow Pages.
One could never tell
the soul has its rages.
I read the papers every day
and hear humanity amiss
in the sad plethora of print.
I see where Walden Pond has been drained
to make an amusement park.
I see they're making Melville
eat his whale.
I see another war is coming
but I won't be there to fight it.
I have read the writing
on the outhouse wall.
I helped Kilroy write it.
I marched up Fifth Avenue
blowing a bugle in a tight platoon
but hurried back to the Casbah
looking for my dog.
I see a similarity
between dogs and me.
Dogs are the true observers
walking up and down the world
through the Molloy country.
I have walked down alleys
too narrow for Chryslers.
I have seen a hundred horseless milkwagons
in a vacant lot in Astoria.
I have heard the junkman's obbligato.
I have ridden the superhighways
and believed the billboard's promises
Crossed the Jersey Flats
and seen the Cities of the Plain
and wallowed in the wilds of Westchester
with its roving bands of natives
in stationwagons.
I have seen them.
I am the man.
I was there.
I suffered
somewhat.
I am an American.
I have a passport.
I did not suffer in public.
and I'm too young to die.
I am a selfmade man.
And I have plans for the future.
I am in line
for a top job.
I may be moving on
to Detroit.
I am only temporarily
a tie salesman.
I am a good Joe.
I am an open book
to my boss.
I am a complete mystery
to my closest friends.
I am leading a quiet life
in Mike's Place every day
contemplating my navel.
I am a part
of the body's long madness.
I have wandered in various nightwoods.
I have leaned in drunken doorways.
I have written wild stories
without punctuation.
I am the man.
I was there.
I suffered
somewhat.
I have sat in an uneasy chair.
I am a tear of the sun.
I am a hill
where poets run.
I invented the alphabet
after watching the flight of cranes
who made letters with their legs.
I am a lake upon a plain.
I am a word
in a tree.
I am a hill of poetry.
I am a raid
on the inarticulate.
I have dreamt
that all my teeth fell out
but my tongue lived
to tell the tale.
for I am a still
of poetry.
I am a bank of song.
I am a playerpiano
in an abandoned casino
on a seaside esplanade
in a dense fog
still playing.
I see a similarity
between the Laughing Woman
and myself.
I have heard the sound of summer
in the rain.
I have seen girls on boardwalks
have complicated sensations.
I understand their hesitations.
I am a gather of fruit.
I have seen how kisses
cause euphoria.
I have risked enchantment
I have seen the Virgin
in an appletree at Chartes
and Saint Joan burn
at the Bella Union.
I have seen giraffes in jungle jims
their necks like love
wound around the circumstances
of the world.
I have seen the Venus Aphrodite
armless in her drafty corridor.
I have heard a siren sing
at One Fifth Avenue.
I have seen the White Goddess dancing
in the Rue des Beaux Arts
on the Fourteenth of July
and the Beautiful Dame Without Mercy
picking her nose in Chumley's.
She did not speak english.
She had yellow hair
and a hoarse voice
and no bird sang.
I am leading a quiet life
in Mike's Place every day
watching the pocket pool players
making the minestrone scene
wolfing the macaronis
and I have read somewhere
the Meaning of Existence
yet have forgotten
just exactly where.
But I am the man
and I'll be there.
and I may cause the lips
of those who are asleep
to speak.
And I may make my notebooks
into sheaves of grass.
And I may write my own
eponymous epitaph
instructing the horsemen
to pass.








Now, for the first time in "Here and Now," here's a poem by James Hutchings.

James says he is 58 years old, and has been a truck driver for a while. He started writing poetry when he was in school, where he played in garage bands and wrote the songs. A sort of natural progression to poetry, he says.

The poem was pointed out to me on the Salty Dreams Poetry Forum, and I liked it.



Epipany

on the second day of basic
I'm leaving the messhall
one arm in my field jacket
holding hat and tray in other
dumping and washing
I hear behind me
"you're out of uniform troop"
I turn to see my platoon leader
fresh out of O.C.S.
all of ninteen rosy cheeked
fatigues new as mine
"drop and give me twenty-five"
gorilla stomps torture for sure
from the squat position
jump up and bang chest
yelling cadence until
my legs give out
and I say "I can't do
no more goddammit"
wrong thing to say
ran to the C.O.
him fresh from 'Nam
screaming eagle on shoulder
jump wings on chest
me just a wannabe
fifty stomps this time
running around company
M-14 over head singing
"I want to be an airborne ranger".......








Deborah Garrison was born in Michigan. She worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker for fifteen years and, in 2000 when her book, A Working Girl Can't Win, was published by Modern Library Paperback, she was poetry editor of Alfred A. Knoph and senior editor at Pantheon books.

This is the title poem from her book.



A Working Girl Can't Win

Is this the birth of a pundit
or a slut? Is she the woman
they courted for her youthful edge
or a kiss-and-tell bimbo,
a careerist coquette?
The loyal daughter to spin doctors
losing their hair or soul sister
to feminist essayists everywhere?
Is her meteoric rise the source
of her potential demise?
Is her worldview equal parts
yuppie whine and new-age rumor?
Can we get a biopsy on her latest
breast tumor? Is she a failed
anorexic, or diet-pill faddist
who'll let it all go and get fat
in her fifties? are her roots
rural, right-leaning? Is she Jewish,
self-hating? Past her sell-by date,
or still ovulating?
Will her husband talk?
Does he mind her success?
Does anyone know - does he see
her undressed? Has she been
photographed? Will she play
truth or dare? And more to the point,
does anyone care?
Come next year, will the masses
be reading her story? Will she be
on the cover, or well past her glory?
Either way, we'll move on, and she'll tire
before long: only her children will grieve
at the way she was wronged?








After a late arrival in Albuquerque, we woke up early Saturday morning and headed north, spending a couple of hours in Sante Fe, partially on purpose and partially because we missed a cut-off and had to drive in circles for a while. We've made that trip so many times, it's still not clear to me how we manage to mess up right there everytime.

We arrived in Durango in time for early dinner before we checked into our hotel, two blocks from downtown and next to the Animas River. I, of course, immediately found a friendly local coffee shop. I'll say more about that later.



winter postcards

black stripe
on a snowy plain,
highway 84,
Santa Fe
to Pagosa Springs,
taking us higher
and even
higher

***

white horse
on a white field
enclosed by a white fence

I am blinded
by the
light

***

icy
water
drips from the mountain side,
gushes
in places
like a waterfall
over shining rock

first sign
of spring thaw
coming

***

boy
and girl
kiss, hold close
on the other side of the window,
bundled
against the cold

another sign
of spring
thaw
coming

***

sidewalks
packed with families
and singles, young men and women,
here
for maybe the last ski
weekend
of the year

desperate
sign
of spring thaw
coming








Next, I have a poem from the 1997 Morse Poetry Prize poet Charles Harper Webb.

The poem is from Webb's book Reading the Water.



Spirits

At night when the streets of your cities are silent and you think them empty, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land.
- Chief Seattle

No street is silent here; still, they return:
faint whispers underneath the bray of horns,
the rumb rumb rumb of gunning cars.

Instead of manzanita leaves and dry white yucca
petals, paper cups, torn taco wrappers,
pages of the L.A. Star and Swinging
Times skip and flutter as they walk
in winter mists past rusty fire escapes
and dusty floors and barred apartment doors.

Instead of deer hiding in chapparal,
whores in skirts narrow as hatbands peer
from shadows, watching for big bucks. At Lucky's,
where pimps suck down pints of Haagen-Dazs,
they crowd the aisles, thin voices mingling
with the buzz of freezers and fluorescent lights.

They slide through alleys where pale boys
with hair in warrior-crests fight for needles
to jab in their skinny arms. They glide down Sunset,
watching hustlers - jeans tight across their wares -
lock quivering johns in come-and-get-me stares.

Unharmed by speeding Broncos, roaring trucks,
they drift through smog, searching for roadrunners,
kingsnakes, possums, live oak trees, wondering
where is the sea breeze that used to come
with morning fog. Where are the owls, the red-
tailed hawks that soared above their hunts, the bobcats,
tortoises, jackrabbits, skunks who gave them
power, were their kin in a boundless world
where everywheree was home.

                            Only at dawn,
when for an hour traffic ebbs, and crows
come back to crouch on streetlamps, and mocking-
birds sing up the sun just as they've done
for fifty thousand years, the hosts are soothed;
and here in Hollywood, where white men's
dreams are born, they shut their eyes
like babies calmed by mother's breast,
and settle down to rest, and sink,
like water into sand, beneath the concrete
that smothers this beautiful, lost land.








Tom Snelgrove is a nineteen year old English poet I've been reading on the Blueline Forum. He says he's a Shipping Clerk in Ipswich, UK and that his interests include writing, guitaring, singing, and drinking.

I like the poem. Tom gets pretty fiery at times. This is more contemplative.



Hypothetically Speaking

the philosophy of one individual is that
which must not be followed
or preached or by any means
taken seriously
music died before it was born
and the renaissance was not exactly
skin deep
you can reach that certain point
of expression within language
where no one has the right
to critique
you can read books by Plato
scripts by Shakespeare
and of course the scribblings
of writers such as
Nietzsche
however you will not be
enlightened
you can throw around quotes
such as
the devotion of the greatest
is to encounter risk and danger
and play dice for death
but never experiment with
hallucinogens
or dare to balance on the
lip of a bridge
man must do as man says
do we not all possess enough self
love or confidence
to listen to number one
and I do not mean self love as in
personalised number plates
or house numbers
no I am strictly speaking in terms
of being strong enough to act upon
your dreams
if you want to sell house and move
to New Zealand
sell your house and move to New Zealand
do not dedicate yourself to a dying cause
for all causes are dying
and this is your life
losing one minute at a time
all we need to know is nothing
ignorance is bliss
and we are suffering








Here are some short pieces by Carl Sandburg, beginning with the one everyone who reads has read at least once.



Fog

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.


Crimson

Crimson is the slow smolder of the cigar end I hold,
Gray is the ash that stiffens and covers all silent the fire.
(A great man I know is dad and while he lies in his coffin
     a gone flame I sit her cumbering shadows and
     smoke and watch my thoughts come and go.)


Whitelight

Your wihtelight flashes the frost tonight
Moon of the purple and silent west.
Remember me one of your lovers of dreams.


Flux

Sand of the sea runs red
Where the sunset reaches and quivers.
Sand of the sea runs yellow
Where the moon slants and wavers.


Losses

I have love
And a child
A banjo
And shadows.
(Losses of God,
All will go
And one day
We will hold
Only the shadows.)








We spent five days in Durango, using it as our base for day trips.



Durango, Colorado

it's
a little city
with a small
liberal arts college
on a hill
overlooking
historic downtown

old buildings
on streets lined
with youth
and art
and a fresh-faced taste
for the greater
art
of living

***

thing is,
the women here,
tall and mostly blond,
look like they could take even
a big man down
and teach him whatfor.

accustomed
as i am to the more petite
south texas
version
of female persuasion

i am
intimidated








I've used poems by performance poet Travis Watkins several times. His is a young, vibrant voice that I like very much.

Here's another of his poems, this one from nearly four years ago, when the American dead in Iraq was less that a thousand.



600 soldiers

I walk around with a pound of verbs and nouns,
My lungs are guns and my words are rounds.
I shot lyrics from the ground so profound the sun came down
And walked away with a frown at what he found.

He gazed through the haze of our nation gone ablaze
With malaise at the ways we choose to live our days.
His rays, shed light on success and found a maze
Of one-ways and runways with arrays of flight delays.

He perplexed at the context of government projects
That project prospects beyond the convex sky.
Why, spend billions on conquest when millions are convicts
And millions are content with minimal progress, damn!

He didn't understand the plan to ban school programs
And demand exams teach what any man can.
They say any man can find work with Uncle Sam
Cause' next we'll ram Iran with every able man.

Man, the sun has a thousand degrees and he can't see
Why steroids in major leagues and gay marriage legality
Is all the president can see besides a war overseas
Over weapons never seized, in the name of liberty.

Back in the sky is where the sun longed to be
So he sang this song to me and said if I set him free,
He'd shine his light so bright that every man could see
The lies and hypocrisy that lie in democracy, but
That bastard lied to me, cause' ....

The rich got tax cuts, while the rest get taxed up
And the government's wrapped up
In sending astronauts back up
To the moon just to pack up
Some dust and then back up
But wait a minute back up...

The economy's cracked up!
Education is jacked up!
Our prisons are blacked up!
And healthcare's hacked up!

But we got tax bucks to hatch up
A new mission back up?
Man!
That shit don't add up
And then that Iraq stuff,
Look...

We found Sadamm in a hole
In the muthafuckin' country
But we can't find one bumb in they' whole muthafuckin' country!
So we aint' got one reason to be in they' muchafuckin' country!
But the sun still shines on our muthafuckin' country?
Shit!
The sun is a muthafuckin' lie!
So I aim at the muthafuckin' sky
And ask that muthafucka' why
He still shines
When
We're still blind
And
600 soldiers have died...

...but we don't mind.

Spring '04








Here's a piece from our friend Alice Folkart, remembering.



Sometime in July with Jude

"Hey Jude, don't be afraid,
take a sad song and make it better..."
That was the sound track of my own backpack-Europe Movie
the summer of '69, and I was the star.
It seemed to be playing in every the sidewalk cafe
and youth hostel dormitory
from Oslo to Ostia, Vienna to Varrenes.

It penetrated
through the hashish haze,
the wine wonderment,
the pot ponderings,
the ale addledness ,
because it was in English,
the blessed, beloved English
that I yearned for.

I didn't hear much English that summer,
never read a paper, except laboriously in my crumpled French.
No TV, no radio, just the sound track on the train, in the cafe.
The greater world off the trail meant nothing to me.
Only my world was real, only experience mattered.

On a mid-July evening in Amsterdam,
or San Sebastian, or Venice,
I heard that there were men dying,
our men, their men, women and children,
all for what someone thought
was a good enough reason - Vietnam.


But the Beatles told me what I could do:

"....don't be afraid,
take a sad song and make it better."

I tried.
I'm still trying.








My next poem is by Brooke Bergan from her book Storyville, A Hidden Mirror. Bergan has an MA and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has taught writing classes and workshops for nearly twenty years in grade schools, high schools, libraries, colleges and universities to widely diverse audiences around the country.

The poems in the book are about Storyville, for many years the officially-sanctioned red-light district in New Orleans. Most of the poems are center around the photographer Ernest J Bellocq who, as a sideline to his professional work as a photographer, created a gallery of photos of Storyville women. Only a few of his portraits survive, all on glass negative plates in fair to poor condition.

I've introduced Storyville and the photographer Bellocq at length when using poetry from this book before. From now on I think I'll just encourage you to google for more background.

A number of the poems in the book refer to specific Bellocq portraits, usually in Bellocq's voice. Apparently "Adele" was a frequent model since a number of the poems refer to her.



plate 28: Adele Wearing A Locket

Adele, you are so real
without clothes, the lens
falters at the soft
curve of stomach,
soiled feet, ribbons
of hair you've let fall
down your back, like my
locket, a kiss between
your breasts.

If I put you against
the filigreed wall, let
your hand rest
on the carved back
of this chair,
will the world
see what I do?








One of our day trips was up to the little town of Silverton.



Silverton

the best thing about
Silverton
is the train ride
to get there,
following the Animas River
up the mountain,
sometimes
riding
right along side it
as it tumbles over rocks
outisde your window,
sometimes
riding
hundreds of feet above it,
sheer rock wall
several feet from the train
on one side
and a long drop
to the river on the other

***

about ten blocks long
and four wide, Silverton is
the county seat of San Juan County
with a big courthouse
on the north end of main street,
looking big enough
to hold every resident of the county
at the same time;
the rest of main street
is small shops,
restaurants
and two 1890s-looking hotels.

***

since this time of the year
the train
only goes about half way to Silverton
because of heavy snow on the tracks,
everything is closed
except for the Brown Bear restaurant
where I have my favorite,
chicken and dumplings,
not the best ever
but good enough,

***

even without the train,
it's a nice drive
to about
12,500 feet
from 6,500 in Durango,
fifty miles
or about a two hour drive
to this little, old former silver-mining
boomtown
cupped between mountains

***

a long way for a bowl of
not-the-best-but-good-enough
chicken and dumplings

but
the air is fresh and cold
and the mountains and forests all around
among the most beautiful
you'll find anywhere

all in all
a well spent half-day








Michael Van Walleghen is a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has won many awards and fellowships. This poem is taken from his book Blue Tango published by the University of Illinois in 1989, He published two previous collections of poetry, The Witchita Poems and More trouble with the Obvious.



Hidden Meaning

Someone has parked her car
as far back as you can go

in Kickapoo Park - and now
she sits there eating candy

and listening to the radio...
A blinding, late November light

glitters on the windblown river.
A flurry of green cellophane

flutters from a side vent. Violins
banjos, that thin country voice

getting lost among the trees...
It all appears arranged somehow

charged with hidden meaning...
But what is it? Faint dogs

dim gunshots when the music stops...
Even the petty, disconsolate detail

of a coathanger bent into an arial
becomes important - as in this light

the merest inkling of the moon
becomes a puff of frozen breath

or vague, translucent sail
stranded in the empty trees...

As in this light I might see myself
home on leave again from the navy

because my girl got pregnant
and we've come her to talk...

But later on, I'll meet my buddies
in the parking lot. Their cars

have names painted on them: Virgo's
Good Time Machine, Evil Rasputin

and the one called simply
Paranoia.








Jerry Damm, a friend from West Texas sent these insults to me that he picked up somewhere on the web.

Some I was familiar with; some I read for the first time.

All are fun.



He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire. - Winston Churchill

A modest little person, with much to be modest about. - Winston Churchill

I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure. - Clarence Darrow

He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary. - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)

Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? - Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)

Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it. - Moses Hadas

He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know. - Abraham Lincoln

I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it. - Mark Twain

He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends. - Oscar Wilde

I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend .... if you have one. - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second ... if there is one. - Winston Churchill, in response.

I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here. - Stephen Bishop

He is a self-made man and worships his creator. - John Bright

I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. - Irvin S. Cobb

He is not only dull himself, he is the cause of dullness in others. - Samuel Johnson

He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up. - Paul Keating

He had delusions of adequacy. - Walter Kerr

There's nothing wrong with you that reincarnation won't cure. - Jack E. Leonard

They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge. - Thomas Brackett Reed

In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily. - Charles, Count Talleyrand

He loves nature in spite of what it did to him. - Forrest Tucker

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it? - Mark Twain

His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork. - Mae West

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go. - Oscar Wilde

He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts .... for support rather than illumination. - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

He has Van Gogh's ear for music. - Billy Wilder

I've had a perfectly wonderful evening But this wasn't it. - Groucho Marx








Our next day trip was to Mesa Verde. We were only able to go to one of the dwellings, Spruce Tree House. The others, including the most impressive of the them, were impossible to get to this time of year because of the snoe.

The last time we went there was about 25 years ago, but the story of the Anasazi is always fresh in my mind. There are lesson in that story for us. For seven hundred years they lived atop their mountain hideaway, until about the year 1200 when they packed up and left. There is no certain knowledge as to where they went or why they left, but the most widely accepted theory now is that, after all those years they had degraded their mesa top enviornment, essentially deforesting it, that they had no choice but to leave.

The difference between them and us, they had someplace else to go to. We don't.



Mesa Verde

it's a steep
and winding road
from the high desert
to the top of the mesa
where for 700 years
the old people, the Anasazi,
built their adobe homes
under protective canyon walls

though
they left in the end
to places unknown
for reasons unknown,
their spirits
walk with you
through rough canyon trails

as we walk
a cluster of very, very large icicles
crashes down from the canyon rim
onto the trail right behind us

even now
the spirits do still
sometimes
speak








My next poem is from the book De Amor Ascuro (Of Dark Love), by Francisco X. Alarcon. Alarcon, a poet and educator, was born in California, in 1954. As a child, he lived in Guadalajara, Mexico, and ever since he was 18 years old he has been living in California. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry.

This is a bilingual book, with translations from the original Spanish to English by Franscisco Aragon in consultation with the poet. It was published by Moving Parts Press in 1991,

The book is a series of very fervent, even obsessive, love poems.



I

there has never been a sun for this love,
like a crazed flower it buds in the dark,
is at once a crown of thorns and
a garland of spring around the temples

a fire, a wound, the bitterest fruit,
but also a breeze and water-source.
a bite to the soul - your breath,
a treetrunk in the current - your chest

make me walk over turbid waters,
be the ax that breaks this lock,
the dew that weeps from trees

if I become mute kissing your thighs
it's that my heart is eagerly searching
your flesh for a new dawning








I'm great at the art of hanging out, and the first thing I look for when I go some place new is a good hanging out spot.

I found one in Durango, right downtown and within walking distance from the hotel.



Magpies Newsstand Cafe

ice cream - smoothies
pastries - pies
espresso - coffee - tea

and a seat in the sun
under blue colorado skies
in early early spring

i try
to think
of a better place to be right now
and
come up
dry








This has turned out to be a longer issue than I had planned. But before I go, I have this last little piece to share.

The Animas River runs right past our hotel room, coming very cold and, with the heavy snow pack this year, increasingly fast from the high mountains. It is clear and beautiful and, in the evening, an attraction to wild life.

We are rewarded with sights such as this.



the Animas River

the Animas River
runs cold and fast
in the orange dusk
of twilight

on the opposite bank
a group of eight
deer
tiptoe
on their delicate hooves
through snow
to find grass
uncovered by the thaw








With a light snow falling, it's time to round up the livestock and hit the road.

Passing between Las Cruces and El Paso, near the little town of Anthony that sits on both side of the Texas/New Mexico border, we picked up a little radio station just for maybe ten minutes at most. I don't know the station and don't know where it was coming from, but it was ten minutes of really good music.

My favorite piece was Guy Clark singing his song, Cold Dog Soup and Rainbow Pie, including these lines in the chorus

Ain't no money in poetry
That's what sets the poet free
I've had all the freedom I can stand
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie
Is all it takes to get me by
Fool my belly till the day I die
Cold dog soup and rainbow pie

I hope you enjoyed your soup and pie here at "Here and Now" this week.

Until next week, remember, all of the work included here remains the property of those who created it. The blog itself was produced by and is the property of me...allen itz.

1 Comments:

at 7:42 PM  Alice Folkart said...

My compliments to you, Tom Snelgrove, Reba and Mr. Ferlinghetti (who I don't think I'd read - just thought I had). Nice issue. Lovely pictures that just take me away. I'm proud to have my work here too.

Alice

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