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Back to Work
Sunday, November 22, 2009 "Peruvian Landscape" by Vincent Martinez IV.11.4. I'm back from break with this slightly scaled back version of "Here and Now." I spent a good part of the past couple of weeks sick with a cold, which is still hanging on, but I did get most of what I wanted to do done. Everything is done on the two books I had in the pipe line. The first of the two, pushing clouds against the wind is a small book of mostly light poems and I expect to get it sent off by the end of November. The second book, a little larger book with mostly darker pieces, is also ready to go, probably in March or April. And I have an idea now for a third book as well, a poetry/photography book with the working title, night eyes. For that book I'm aiming at the end of next year, proiding it works and i can actually write the poems when i actually sit down to the doing of it. An ambitious schedule, with the hope that, somewhere along the way, I'll sell a book or two. This week I've gone to my first book, Seven Beats a Second, to feature some of its art. The paintings are by my collaborator in the book, artist Vincent Martinez of Austin. A senior art student when we did the book in 2005, Vince has continued to work on his art and is showing frequently and selling well. Would that we could translate some of that to the book. In addition to Vince's art, this is what we have of poets and poetry this week in this hurry-up before Thanksgiving edition of "Here and Now." Number 32 from Time Me i am a Chinese buffet From Chinese Love Poems From The Book of Songs From The Nineteen Old Poems Gazint at Spring, II & II by Xue Tao The Coat with the Golden Threads by Du Qiuniang Laurel Lamperd Stroke Nila Northsun kids Me i just don't see how this is going to work Anne Sexton The Wall Lauel Lamped Tampa Legacy Me a day for deeds Andrew M. Greeley The Fifth of May - 1954 Me 13 squared Pablo Neruda The Night at Isla Negra Tomas Transtomer From March - '54 Elizabeth Coatsworth Whale at Twilight Laurel Lamperd On Dark Afternoons Margaret Atwood Five Poems for Dolls Me behind bars Michael Van Wallenghen Fishing with Children Me an atheist's prayer On we go.  "Lime Grape" by Vincent Martinez My first poem this week is by Israeli poetYehuda Amichai, from the collection Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994. The poems in the book were translated from Hebrew by Benjamin and Barbara Harshay. Amichai, born Ludwig Pleuffer in 1924 in Wuzburg, Germany, was considered by many both in Israel and internationally as Israel's greatest modern poet. He was also the first to write in colloquial Hebrew. He died in Israel in 2000. The poem I'm using this week is number 32 from a series called Time, first published in 1978. When I was young, the country was young too. My father Was everybody's father. When I was happy, the country was happy, when I jumped Upon her, she jumped under me. The grass that covered her in spring Softened me too. He soil in summer pained me As parched skin in my soles. When I loved Immensely, her independence was announced, when my hair Waved, her banners waved. When I fought, She fought. When I rose, she rose too, and when I declined She began declining with me. Now I part from all that. Like a thing glued on something when the glue dries up, I separate and roll into myself. Recently I saw a clarinet player In the Police Orchestra playing in David's Tower. His hair white and his face calm: a face From 1946, that sole year Between famous and terrible years When nothing happened but a great hope and his playing And me lying with a girl in a quiet room in Jerusalem nights. I haven't seen him since then, but the hope For a better world hasn't left his face, till now. Later, I sought some nonkosher sausage And two rolls and went home. I heard the evening news, Ate and went to bed, And the memory of first love came to me Like a feeling of falling before you fall asleep. Oh my old, venerable teacher, life Is not deep as you said. History And the love of Buber and Marx are just A crust of paved road on the great earth. Oh, my teacher, the boundary of toys is so close; When a rifle shoots and kills, and father really died. And the boundary of camouflage, which is also the boundary Of love: instead of a cannon, a real tree Grows. And she will be I, and I - her.  "Finger Tips On An Inca's Back" by Vincent Martinez I guess being a lightweight is better than being no weight at all. i am a Chinese buffet i would like to be a poet of deep insight and emotion, but the closest i've ever come is deeply embarrassing my most fiercely wrought thoughts aren't original and my original thoughts are shallow as Matagorda mud flats at low tide i'm a light poet if a poet at all, not an illuminating light, only feather weight instead, talking about all the funny things that happen during the course of a lightweight life the poet as a Chinese buffet - take a bite and move on, there's another one coming and you won't remember it either past the initial tasting  "Orange Grey" by Vincent Martinez From a Chinese buffet to the beautifully illustrated anthology Chinese Love Poems, published in 2004 by Barnes & Noble Books, editor Jane Portal, Assistant Keeper in the Department of Asia in the British Museum. The first poem from the book is from The Book of Songs. By the banks of that marsh, there are sweet flags and lotus There is a handsome man, I am smitten, what should I do? Asleep or awake I do nothing, my tears flow like rain. By the banks of the marsh, there are sweet flags and lotus And just one handsome man, stately and tall. Asleep or awake I do nothing, in my heart I am grieved. By the banks of that marsh, there are sweet flags and lotus There is a handsome man, very tall and grave. Asleep or awake I do nothing, tossing and burying my face in the pillow. The next poem is from The Nineteen Old Poems. Green, green the river-side grass, Dense, dense the garden willows, Fair, fair the girl upstairs, Bright, bright she faces the casement, Gay, gay her red-powdered face, Slender, slender the white hand she extends. Sometime a singing-girl, Now she is a traveler's wife; The traveler has departed and returns not, And a mateless bed is hard to keep alone. The next poem is by Xue Tao, who lived from 768 to 832. Gazing at Spring, II & III I gather herbs and tie a lover's knot to send to one who understands my songs. So now I've cut that springtime sorrow off. and now the spring-struck birds renew their cries. ~~~~~ Windblown flowers grow older day by day. and our best season dwindles in the past. Without someone to tie the knot of love, no use to tie up all those love-knot herbs. The last poem from this anthology is by Du Qiuniang from the Tang dynasty. The Coat with the Golden Threads I warn you - cherish not your gold-threaded coat; I warn you - cherish rather the days of your youth! When the flower blooms, ready for picking, pick it you must: Don't wait till the flower falls and pick a bare twig!  "Abuelo" by Vincent Martinez I have four poems this week from Laurel Lamperd, one of our poet friend from far-off (from here anyway) Australia. Stoke Hello there, old mother. What are you thinking with your tongue lolling and your eyes gazing beyond me. The bustle of the nurses amid the noises from the patients visitors tiptoeing through the door. Can you hear or are your thoughts of other things. Horses pounding through the surf The shouts of my brother and me. You, turning to laugh And the wave crashing against Bellerophon's legs. I wait beside you a dish of pap in my hand. Is this then to be my fate? My daughter sitting where I sit as I feed you and me in your chair.  "Rooftop" by Vincent Martinez Now I have a poem by Nila Northsun, from her book a snake in her mouth, published by West End Press of Albuquerque in 1997. Northsun was born of Chippewa-Shoshone descent in Nevada in 1951. A graduate of the University of Montana, at the time her book was published, she still lived on the Stillwater Indian reservation in Nevada, where she was director of a teen crisis center. Another new poet for me. I like her. kids and you think oh no not one of those cutesy kid poems well hell yes only people who have kids know they are goddamn cute at times hilariously funny sometimes the biggest nags & whiners the uncontrollable headache & worry causes sometimes they can make you so proud your eyes water & you swear your heart feels as big as a bull's liver when you have your first baby you wonder what else could have filled your conversations but how one diaper compares with another how the kids look like aunt sue or how they're more fun than the best dog you ever had still there are times you almost understand child abuse & "shut that fucker up" & other times you're horrified to read of children locked away in a room for years or scalded or burnt or slammed against walls broken baby bones raped 4 months old tender young flesh black & blue how incredibly sad but wait wait i really didn't want to get into that i wanted to write about my kids the 2 year old dropped his m & m on the sidewalk then stepped on it he said "i killed it" i thought that was funny the 6 year old is learning to skate he's so proud & i'm so proud as he gets around the skating rink only falling a couple of times but it's so slapstick he hops along with his feet his arms flailing i laugh & laugh i think i'd split my gut if i had a dozen out there doing that  "Breath Felt" by Vincent Martinez At the time I wrote this next piece, I had just found this coffee shop. I have since found another place a bit more comfortably funky. i just don't see how this is going to work this place is so clean-cut it makes me want to shave before i sit down to work and it's Saturday and i don't shave on Saturday, i just don't - it's like Lois Lane dating Clark Kent, Kent so square and all-American clean and Lois so hot, so randy and ready for a super-fling, it's just hard to see how it's gonna work me trying to write a poem in this place, is like trying to read one of those decadent French poets to my old high school English teacher who didn't even put up with contractions, much less people fucking and pissing and all that other stuff on the page serious editing would be required or she'd have a heart attack just like i'd have to clean up my language before trying to write here; hell, i'd have to clean up my mind and it's that black and twisty thing that keeps me going it's just hard to see how it's gonna work  "Cloud Exits" by Vincent Martinez The next poem is by Anne Sexton, from her book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1975. Sexton had published eight books of poetry before this one, her last book published after her death by suicide in 1974. The Wall Nature is full of teeth that come in one by one, then decay, fall out. In nature nothing is stable, all is change, bears, dogs, peas, the willow, all disappear. Only to be reborn. Rocks crumble, make new forms, oceans move the continents mountains rise up and down like ghosts yet all is natural, all is change. As I write this sentence about one hundred and four generations since Christ, nothing has changed except knowledge, the test tube. Man still falls into the dirt and is covered. As I write this sentence one thousand are going and one thousand are coming. It is like the well that never dries up. It is like the sea which is the kitchen of God. We are all earthworms, digging into our wrinkles. We live beneath ground and if Christ should come in the form of a plow and dig a furrow and push us up into the day we earthworms would be blinded by the sudden light and writhe in our distress. As I write this sentence I too writhe. For all you who are going, and there are many who are climbing their pain, many who will be painted out with a black ink suddenly and before it is time, for those many I say, awkwardly, clumsily, take off you life like trousers, you shoes, your underwear, then take off you flesh, unpick the lock of you bones. In other words take off the wall that separates you from God.  "Chente's Hente" by Vincent Martinez Here's my second poem from our friend Laurel Lamperd Tampa Legacy She made a banner to carry to Parliament House in the march for the asylum seekers. You're too old, gran, her family chided, those golden children born in the sun. Chased across Lithuanian snows by German SS men and Russian soldiers, she remembers the camps the smell beaten into her skin rising above cities farmlands and deserts all the way to the Timor Sea.  "Chicken Wings & Pretty Things" by Vincent Martinez This next little piece is a pep-talk I wrote to myself about a week ago, when, after a time of feeling really lousy, it began to seem I was getting better. a day for deeds a day begun with a gloom of fog radiant now with sunshine and possibility a day for deeds not necessarily great but welcome anyway after days vacant in a fog of gloom  "Float" by Vincent Martinez Andrew M. Greeley, a priest ordained in the diocese of Chicago forty years ago, is a professor of social science at the University of Chicago and a noted scholar, author of many books on sociology. He is also a best-selling fiction writer, beginning with his first novel, The Cardinal and a series of detective stories, featuring his character, Father Blacky. This next poem is from Greeley's first collection of poetry, The Sense of Love, published by the Ashland Poetry Press in 1992. The Fifth of May - 1954 Ordination The expected day was bitter cold, Warning us perhaps Of what we'd have to face - But no hint of John Or the unchanging changed And the rock that came apart. Would that our hearts were warm, Ready for the frantic fray, Light and quick, dancing in youthful glee - But they gave us not the slightest hint; Unprepared, we came standing docile there When the roof came tumbling in. A few escaped never to return, Others ran for safe and quiet holes, Still others stood mute, the end accepting. Some sensing fun, said let's begin to dance - A blind leap long ago in the deeper dark. Do it again? I already told you so.  "Kristi" by Vincent Martinez This piece was written in response to the Fort Hood massacre, trying to find some way to write about the event without descending into the bullshit that such events so often bring forth. 13 squared thirteen in honor lie beneath the Texas sun that's the poem i started today and it went on from there becoming more banal and inadequate with each new line proving again i am a poet of light things, of little quirks and serendipitous conjunctions of people and circumstances, not a poet of tragedy, not a poet of serious things like death, except on a self-indulgent pseudo-philosophical level where clever aphorisms and bombast can cover lack of an emotionally rooted sense of loss, an understanding that death is about death's survivors not those who actually die so today i think of those not dead, those left behind instead, mothers, fathers, children, husbands, wives all the loved ones and friends and all of us who had no direct connection but who might someday in the normal passage of a full life have met, have loved those for whom no full life was allowed, us, the survivors whose lives now have a hole the dead once filled, a hole that will fade but never will be filled as every death leaves an empty space, a blank passage where once our lives conjoined, traveled together down the long road of living i knew none of these thirteen, still i feel a loss beyond my expression  "Machupichu" by Vincent Martinez Next I have several poems from Poetry for the Earth, a collection of poems that celebrate nature published Fawcett Columbine in 1991. The first of the poems is by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. The Night in Isla Negra The ancient night and the unruly salt beat at the walls of my house; lonely is the shadow, the sky by now is a beat of the ocean, and sky and shadow explode in the fray and unequal combat; all night long they struggle, nobody knows the weight of the harsh clarity that will go on opening like a languid fruit; thus is born on the coast, out of turbulent shadow, the hard dawn, nibbled by the salt in movement, swept up by the weight of night, bloodstained in its marine crater. The second poem from the anthology is by Swedish writer, poet and translator Tomas Transtomer, translated by John F. Deane. From March '79 Tired of all who come with words, words but no language I went to the snow-covered island. The wild does not have words. The unwritten pages spread themselves out in all directions! I come across the marks of roe-deer's hooves in the snow. Language but no words. The final poem from the anthology this week is by Elizabeth Coatsworth, an American author of children's fiction and poetry. Her novel The Cat Who Went to Heaven won the 1931 Newbery Medal. Born in 1893, in Buffalo, New York, Coatsworth attended Buffalo Seminary for High School, then graduated from Vassar College in 1915 and received a Master of Arts from Columbia University in 1916. Her first publications were poems in magazines, and her first book published was Fox Footprints in 1923. In 1929, she married writer Henry Beston, with whom she had two children. She died at her home in Nobleboro, Maine, August 31, 1986. Whale at Twilight The sea is enormous, but calm with evening and sunset, rearranging its islands for the night, changing its own blues, smoothing itself against the rocks, without playfulness, without thought. No stars are out, only sea birds flying to distant reefs. No vessels intrude, no lobstermen haul their pots. Only somewhere out toward the horizon a thin column of water appears and disappears again, and then rises once more, tranquil as a fountain in a garden where no wind blows.  "Vieja" by Vincent Martinez Now here's my third and last piece from our Australian friend Laurel Lamperd. On Dark Afternoons I read about a woman wandering along grassy banks on dark afternoons seeking her past. In my mind, I see them. My grandparents in that house of bush timber. He smoked a pipe while she kneaded bread and set it wrapped in a blanket by the fire to rise. The dusk sweeps gently at my window as in my mind I travel from town to farm and back again. And the night grows darkly by my door.  "Words Like Birds" by Vincent Martinez The next poem is by Margaret Atwood, Canadian author, poet, critic, essayist, feminist and social campaigner. She is among the most-honoured authors of fiction in recent history; she is a winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and Prince of Asturias award for Literature, has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize five times, winning once, and has been a finalist for the Governor General's Award seven times, winning twice. While she may be best known for her work as a novelist, she is also an award winning poet, having published 15 books of poetry. Atwood has also published many short stories. The poem I chose for this week is from Atwood's book, Two-Headed Poems, published by Simon and Schuster in 1978. Five Poems for Dolls i Behind glass in Mexico this clay doll draws its lips back in a snarl; despite its beautiful dusty shawl, it wishes to be dangerous. ii See how the dolls resent us, with their bulging foreheads and minimal chins, their flat bodies never allowed to bulb and swell, their faces of little thugs. This is not a smile, this glossy mouth, two stunted teeth; the dolls gaze at us with the filmed eyes of killers. iii There have always been dolls as long as there have been people, In the trash heaps and abandoned temples the dolls pile up; the sea is filling with them. What causes them? Or are they gods, causeless, something to talk to when you have to talk, something to throw against the wall? A doll is a witness who cannot die, with a doll you are never alone. On the long journey under the earth, in the boat with two prows, there were always dolls. iv Or did we make them because we needed to love someone and could not love each other? It was love, after all, that rubbed the skins from their gray cheeks, crippled their fingers, snarled their hair, brown or dull gold. Hate would merely have smashed them. You change, but the doll I made of you lives on, a white body leaning in a sunlit window, the features wearing away with time, frozen in the gaunt pose of a single day, holding in its plaster hand your doll of me v Or: all dolls come from the land of the unborn, the almost-born; each doll is a future dead at the roots, a voice heard only on breathless nights, a desolate white memento. Or: these are the lost children, those who have died or thickened to full growth and gone away. The dolls are their souls or cast skins which line the shelves of our bedrooms and museums, disguised as outmoded toys, images of our sorrow, shedding around themselves five inches of limbo.  "Jazz Splice" by Vincent Martinez Sometimes, you're in just the right mood and you see something and a poem almost writes itself. behind bars sunlight heavy with early dew rushes through the window, horizontal blinds throwing shadow bars across the floor a prisoner of morning light, i bask in my confinement  "Predictable Patterns" by Vincent Martinez Next, I have a poem by Michael Van Wallenghen from his book Blue Tango, published the University of Illinois Press in 1989. Van Wallenghen, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has won many awards and fellowships. Fishing with Children Beyond the few clear stumps and furry sticks, the bottom drops off quickly, quickly... But it's easy enough to guess the broken glass and junk down there, the lost shoes the stolen bike. Easier to imagine trash like this in the gray municipal lagoon than fish in fact. The four and five year olds however keep seeing Northern Pike - monster catfish. Even the worms excite them. What acrobats they are especially cut in half! Urged to bait their own hooks they stand around staring at the life in their hands like so many self-involved dumbstruck fortune-tellers. then they stab themselves or tangle in the bushes... the whole chaotic business looking faintly Dionysian - a manic kind of dance almost ‘or magic stone-age ritual demanding blood. But later cast out upon the dark water our fateful bobbers drift as over the face of the void like stars. So we study them of course, astrologers now hoping for the smallest sign or signal of good fortune - a bluegill, anything at all from the deep dead calm where stars and even children disappear. None of them for the moment disappearing though some look tremulous and on the brink...  "Myth Melt" by Vincent Martinez This next poem is a combination of scientific fact and hope. The poem does factually describe how things really work. Everything that is today is everything there ever was. The base elements of the big bang recombining time and time again to create everything from moon rocks to the soft underside of a baby's chin. The hope is - actually, hope is too strong a word - better, the desire is that somewhere in all the destruction and re-creation there is consciousness of some form. As well as, underneath it all, an understanding that what a man desires has nothing to do with it at all. an atheist's prayer send me to the fire naked as the day i came sear from me this corrupting flesh release me into the sky, pale smoke of me drifting where the winds might blow, letting me fall on some rocky field where i might become a part of something new, bits of me and someday you and all creation that comes, then goes, the cycle of me and you and all the rest repeated again and again and again unto the end amen  The Ray-Guhn Show Choir, detail from "Jazz Splice" by Vincent Martinez That's it for this "back to work issue." Catch us again next week for more good stuff. In the meantime and as usual, all of the material presented in this blog remains the property of it's creators. As owner and producer of the blog, I exempt myself from that injunction. You are welcome to use any of may own material any way you want, properly credited, of course, to me...allen itz. |
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