poem I woke up thinking about on my birthday

A Short History of My Life

Unlike Lao-tzu, conceived of a shooting star, it is said,
And carried inside his mother’s womb
For 62 years, and born, it’s said once again, with white hair,
I was born on a Sunday morning,

untouched by the heavens,

Some hair, no teeth, the shadows of twilight in my heart,
And a long way from the way.
Shiloh, the Civil War battleground, was just next door,
The Tennessee River soft shift at my head and feet.
The dun-colored buffalo, the sands of the desert,
Gatekeeper and characters

were dragon years from then.

Like Dionysus, I was born for a second time.
From the flesh of Italy’s left thigh, I emerged one January
Into a different world.

It made a lot of sense,

Hidden way, as I had been, for almost a life.
And I entered it open-eyed, the wind in my ears,
The slake of honey and slow wine awake on my tongue.
Three years I stood in S. Zeno’s doors,

and took more Rome than Rome,

Whatever was offered me.
The snows of the Dolomites advanced to my footfalls.
The lemons of Lago di Garda fell to my hands.

Fast-forward some forty-five years,

and a third postpartum blue.

But where, as the poet asked, will you find it in history?
Alluding to something else.
Nowhere but here, my one and only, nowhere but here.
My ears and my sick senses seem pure with the sound of water.
I’m back, and it’s lilac time,
The creeks running eastward unseen through the dank morning,
Beginning of June. No light on leaf,
No wind in the evergreens, no bow in the still-blond grasses.
The world in its dark grace.

I have tried to record it.

Charles Wright

retry, fail

From Chris Hedges' recent column "The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free":

American culture—or cultures, for we once had distinct regional cultures—was systematically destroyed in the 20th century by corporations. These corporations used mass communication, as well as an understanding of the human subconscious, to turn consumption into an inner compulsion. Old values of thrift, regional identity that had its own iconography, aesthetic expression and history, diverse immigrant traditions, self-sufficiency, a press that was decentralized to provide citizens with a voice in their communities were all destroyed to create mass, corporate culture. New desires and habits were implanted by corporate advertisers to replace the old. Individual frustrations and discontents could be solved, corporate culture assured us, through the wonders of consumerism and cultural homogenization. American culture, or cultures, was replaced with junk culture and junk politics. And now, standing on the ash heap, we survey the ruins. The very slogans of advertising and mass culture have become the idiom of common expression, robbing us of the language to make sense of the destruction. We confuse the manufactured commodity culture with American culture.

... ... ...

The modern world, as Kafka predicted, has become a world where the irrational has become rational, where lies become true. And facts alone will be powerless to thwart the mendacity spun out through billions of dollars in corporate advertising, lobbying and control of traditional sources of information. We will have to descend into the world of the forgotten, to write, photograph, paint, sing, act, blog, video and film with anger and honesty that have been blunted by the parameters of traditional journalism. The lines between artists, social activists and journalists have to be erased. These lines diminish the power of reform, justice and an understanding of the truth. And it is for this purpose that these lines are there.

_______

Some poems from Rachel Loden's book Hotel Imperium.

The Death of Checkers

Grant that the old Adam in this Child may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up in him. — The Book of Common Prayer

This is the new socialist brain. This is the statue
of Dzerzhinsky falling over. This is my wife Pat.
This is an ode to the Bratsk Hydroelectric Project.
And I just want to say [abort, retry, fail . . .]

the kids, like all kids, love the little dog.
This/is/your/brain/speaking . . . . So I want you all
to stonewall it. Because gentlemen, this is my last
dance contest, last waltz with Leonid

around the Winter Palace. This is the Kommissar
of Moonbeams, this is the Soviet of Working People’s
Reveries. This is the new man born out of Adam.
These are the new world order mysteries — oh,

Republican cloth coat. Oh gallery of Trotskyist
apostasies. Tricia and Julie do not weep for me -
I live and flourish in the smooth newt’s tiny eyes,
my new brain fizzing with implanted memories.



Blues for the Evil Empire

with a line by Unamuno

Consider the late Eurasian entity, how it lumbered
into the groggy arms of history where it was

buried. Which is more than you can say
for Lenin’s body, chilly like a mammoth

in an ice floe, if less hairy. An old man in the square
asks ‘Who is laughing at us?’ then drifts unevenly

away. The czar’s nephew comes alive
in Finland like some cyborg, sent into the future

with a mission to annoy; there are the plagues:
evangelists, economists, and experts

of all kinds, Americans who read the future
in a glass of tea, and analyze ‘the Slavic mind.’

At home, cold warriors, like dying jellyfish,
grow dim. Why no joy in Washington, no dancing

in the streets — we ‘won,’ but sleep uneasy
in our victory. The evil empire, vanquished, seeks

a plusher berth within — a red and rising sun?
A few blocks from the White House, my city twists

and keens, and someone’s child is bought and sold.
— We do not die of darkness, but of the cold.

Rachel Loden

from Hotel Imperium

Support a poet! Click here to purchase Rachel Loden's Hotel Imperium.

poems on poems

The Sublime

And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your head open
and cello music pours out of a stranger's window and the most
gorgeous woman you ever loved says to the hit the road and you do
see them—that stranger and this woman. Kissing everywhere.

In the trees. On boats. In the kitchen cupboards. The fog
of daily life never lifts and the checkbook needs proper
calculations and the dog would like supper please and now
without warning the dream returns. It breaks your head open.

You lie there for a week and no one finds you until the dog
having lost its dignity finally eats and when there is no more
howls. It howls. And you are a missing person, a passage
of shit quivered into the dirt. A good boy. A terrible dream

someone picks up with a plastic bag wrapped in his hand
to throw away and you are thrown away. You do it every day.
Walking too early, driving to work, working and returning.
Reading poems of great beauty and crying at the movies.

Touching the hair of your niece who laughs at water. Flying
over cornfields so close and so openly that when you wake
there is silk in your beard. Your arms are tired and hang
at your sides like the wings of a migratory bird who is about

to die. And what good is a dream finally? It breaks your heart
and you stand in the lush dark of the moment after twilight
ends and begin to sing and nothing makes sense to you
and you sing louder for a while, then awkwardly sit down

where you are. And the stars overhead shine a little—no more
or less than usual—and whether it is daylight and they are invisible
or whether it is night and they are the embers of a blacksmith's
fire, they shine and you are grateful. That love is like a hammer.

Steve Scafidi
from Sparks from a Nine Pound Hammer







A Drag Queen Is Like a Poem

in the same way that a drag
queen is like a woman
except of course that the woman
has real breasts while the drag queen
unbuttons her blouse
to reveal the realistic breast form
for cross dressers she’s ordered
like alligator shoes
from the Gucci catalog.
But then it’s not so much shoes
that matter when talking
about poetry as it is the hair
and jewelry and the way
lipstick has been applied.
Any teenage girl can tell you
that a good poem needs
to wear a short skirt if she
wants the boys to notice,
and that eye shadow can say
just as much as the subtle shadings
of anything Keats or Eliot
ever wrote. The truth is
it’s all about truth
and beauty, or what passes for it,
and so there will always be someone
to argue it doesn’t matter
what sprouts between
your legs like so much moss
between the paving stones. You can
always just pad or shave
or powder. You can strap
on foam tits and a rubber ass
to remind yourself that the language
of the body can always
be rewritten, that ultimately poem
is to the poet as drag
is to the queen, each word
fitting together like male
and female, like an infant
and his mother, two bodies
two hearts, but one
coming out of the other.

Bruce Snider
from The Year We Studied Women

"Surrender"

Congratulations to Dorianne Laux who has a poem from Salt Hill up at Verse Daily today. Dorianne is doing a bunch of readings and conferences this summer and fall. Check out her MySpace Blog to see if she's coming to your town.


Surrender

Supine under branches
and blossoms, eavesdropping
on a hummingbird,
the high-pitched flutter
of her seed-sized heart.
Drunk on the scent of apricots.
My spine's thirty-three stones
lined up on the new grass.

I'm a rosy dot on a map's
patch of green, my naked toes
pointing east below gobbets
of buttery sun. Between journeys,
obstacles: water and rock, iron
and chalk dust, the white ribs
of the fence and the gopher's
freshly dug holes.

Petals in tatters on my bare thigh.
the screen door's wheeze
doesn't bother me, the news
still rolled in its red rubber band.

Right now I'm nowhere and no one
cares. Nothing needs me but the dirt
beneath me. The sky gazes down
and doesn't see me. Even the wind

is like a mother, thinking of her lover,
as she parts my hair.

Dorianne Laux
from Salt Hill

online presence

There've been several folks over the last couple weeks that've told me they looked online for my work but couldn't find any. Well, there are a couple of pieces out there if you dig through Google long enough, but I'm not sure I'd want anyone to find those poems anyhow.

Here's why my poetry presence is limited to blogs and reviews: I can't post any of the recent work because it's all been submitted to journals for publication and because most editors now consider poems on blogs to be "previously published." Also, I've only recently begun submitting to online journals. If they end up taking anything, I'll certainly link to it. Any platform to reach a wider readership the better, and there are certainly some fine online journals out there.

While I've got about a dozen or so poems forthcoming, poems whose rights haven't reverted back to me, it occurred to me this morning that I can certainly post older poems that've been published and the rights to which I do hold.

I'm not sure how long I'll leave them up, or how many I'll post. My concern is that, because my manuscript is floating about, I shouldn't post them. Anyone know? Anyone have insight on that? I mean, they've already been published and I do own the rights.

But for what it's worth, here are a few poems that have been published previously.

[UPDATE: I decided to take these poems down. When I initially posted them I thought it was a good idea, but I didn't feel comfortable with it at the same time. I'm not sure of the precise reason. Anyway, thanks to those who posted comments or emailed that you like the three I posted. I'll be sure to post links to work that becomes available online.]

Meter

Today's Thomas Hardy's birthday, so I thought of this poem by Charles Wright. A proper celebration to be certain.

First off, here's what Wright said to introduce this poem when I heard him read a few years ago in Portland. It's pretty damn funny, and very "Charles Wright.":

This is called "In Praise of Thomas Hardy," the great English novelist and poet, the wonderful metricist. It of course has nothing to do with Thomas Hardy. But he liked, he said, "I refuse to give up using the word 'smalled' as a verb," and I thought, This is my kind of guy. I never thought about using it as a verb, but what the hell, I mean if you refuse to do it, I'm with you. So this is for you, Tom. Or Mr. Hardy, as we say in my house.

In Praise of Thomas Hardy

Each second the earth is struck hard

by four and a half pounds of sunlight.

Each second.
Try to imagine that.
No wonder deep shade is what the soul longs for,
And not, as we always thought, the light.
No wonder the inner life is dark.
Sounding, and sicced on like a dog,

they all go down and devolve,

Vowel-dancing, heart-sick,
Hoping for realignment and a space that won't shine.

Unlike the October moon, Apached and blade-dazzled, smalled
Down the western sky

into Ovidian intersect

With time and its ghostly renderings.
Unlike the leaves of the ash tree, moon-treated and hanging on
For one day longer or so.
Unlike our shrunk selves, dripping like washing on the line.

Charles Wright
from A Short History of the Shadow

pleased

And the streak continues.... I received word a couple days ago from an editor at Sonora Review saying they wanted to publish four poems. Alas, two of the four had already been taken by other journals and they'd just not received my withdrawal email yet. But still, they're going to publish "Sparrows Sold for a Copper Coin & Not One Falls to the Ground" and "The Big Bopper's Soul Petitions Entry" in their fall issue.

With the recent streak of acceptances I've had over the last couple months, the two in Sonora Review makes twenty published (or forthcoming) poems from the manuscript, which pleases me greatly, but also make me rethink some of what I'm including there, or at least helps me see, somewhat, the cracks and what needs filling in and where.

_______

Today begins the first class meeting of the summer teaching term. Every weekday morning in June for an hour and a half, my new friends and I will discuss visual rhetoric and try to write culturally relevant responses.

After the syllabi and schedules are handed out, we're going to discuss a 1961 commercial for "tasty" concession snacks shown at a drive-in movie juxtaposed with Paris Hilton's infamous Carl's Jr. "Thickburger" ad. Then, we'll look at two movie trailers: "American Teen" and "The Breakfast Club." And, if there's time, we'll compare the rhetoric of "real" college life (the little these early freshman have "read") to Asher Roth's music video for "I Love College."

I've already received several emails from students, and sounds like I've got a number of highly motivated minds. Good.

_______

Some poetry links:

• Nick Laird asks, "Why does everything have to be like something else?"

• L.A. Times review of Anna Journey's If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting.

• New York Times review of Frederick Seidel's Poems: 1959-2009.

• William Archila's The Art of Exile is now available for purchase.

Fortunate

Today, poetry lovers are fortunate to have Joe's poem, "Lyrical," featured at The Writer's Almanac and read aloud by Garrison Keilor.

Joe Millar's latest book is Fortune, published by Eastern Washington University Press.

Here's the poem & a handful of links to a few other poems by Joe Millar which I've posted here over the years.


Lyrical

The spaniel next door yaps at the sparrows,
he yaps at the crows and the mailman,
yaps at the compost pile and the sunflower,
yaps at the rain and the sky. He yaps
at the steps leading down to the creek
where the flax plants bloom high as my waist
and blue flowers force their way up
though small stones the color of night. He
yaps at the garbage truck's back-up beeper,
iron bell song of the priest and bridegroom,
song of the lone ship, song of the train,
song of the big waves rolling and breaking
over the western reefs. He yaps at the rosebush,
yaps at the fence, song of the sidewalk cracked
in half, the wine bottle resting against the curb,
the neighbor who doesn't come home.

Joseph Millar
from Fortune

[Click here to listen to Garrison's reading.]


Here are some links for further reading:

• "Love Pirates" from Overtime
• "Dark Harvest" from Overtime
• "Feeding Tristam's Snake" from Fortune
• "Fall Night" and "Caroling" from Fortune
• "Commitment" from Konundrum Engine Literary Review
• an interview with Joseph Millar by Dave Jarecki

Icarus

Reread this poem by Auden a couple days ago while studying for my poetry prelim & was reminded of the "response" poem by WCWs. Later that night, while thinking about a long poem I've been working on, and while looking again at Larry Levis's sequence called "The Perfection of Solitude," I remade an Auden--Williams--Levis connection. There's got to be something there worth investigating. I'll think on it, and put those thoughts here.

[Update: I got an email from a friend asking why I didn't mention Jack Gilbert's poem "Failing and Flying." Honestly, it just didn't come to mind for whatever reason. But, here's a link to it. Click here and scroll down to the poem. Enjoy!]

Here's the Bruegel painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," and the three poems. You should be able to click the painting to make it bigger in a new window.


Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

W.H. Auden
from Collected Poems


Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

William Carlos Williams
from Selected Poems


3. Turban

from "The Perfection of Solitude: A Sequence"

Sometimes, in the Brueghel paintings, the children who are skating

hold perfectly

Still for a moment; I could have counted them there, if I wanted to.

Or a boy

Has just fallen out of the sky, & no matter how hard the water is

the splash

On the canvas is always silent, & can only grow more so. And the

water rising

For centuries around the boy is famous only for the little silence it

displays.

The way the paint is cracked slightly on the canvas is meant to

remind you

That this is, after all, only a painting. In which Brueghel has

destroyed time.

And Rembrandt, smiling at this, still has to put his house up for

sale before

He can paint another self-portrait. This time he is St. Paul with a

wry turban

On his head! There is a kind of forgiveness in it all. He looks as if

he is

About to smile, but he does not, & then after a few moments it

looks as if

He will never smile again. The turban is the dirty white of a

popular beach.

Larry Levis
from The Widening Spell of the Leaves

Mike "Mother Hucker" Huckabee writes a poem

This from the Kansas City Star's political blog Prime Buzz:

In the midst of Republican criticism against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's claim that the Bush administration had misled her about waterboarding, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has issued a unique yet rather effective statement belaboring the speaker.

Here's the poem. It wasn't presented with any line breaks, and so I don't want to impose my ear on the Huckster's. Feel free to critique his measure.

Here's a story about a lady named Nancy A ruthless politician, but dressed very fancy Very ambitious, she got herself elected Speaker But as for keeping secrets, she proved quite a "leaker."

She sat in briefings and knew about enhanced interrogation; But claims she wasn't there, and can't give an explanation. She disparages the CIA and says they are a bunch of liars; Even the press aren't buying it and they're stoking their fires.

I think Speaker Pelosi has done too much speaking; And instead of her trashing our intelligence officials, it's her nose that needs tweaking.