“Poetry / Doesn’t / Protect / You / Anymore.”

Elsewhere a suicide car bomber struck a police station.
Killing at least one and wounding seven.
Gunmen also killed a teacher near his home.
The bakeries become targets. The saints removed from the walls.
For protection. One who was kidnapped and tortured.
And dumped with thirteen bodies.
And a barber shop was ambushed killing two including the owner.
A tire repairman was shot dead.
And one who refused to change the ring on his cell phone.
They put four bullets in his head.
Spoken anonymously. For fear of reprisals.
And a analyst. For the Center.
You get enclaves and fortresses.
People become violent to the people outside.

If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or
5 cents for 50 chiles can Walmex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to the US.
Will they open a Supercenter in Fallujah once it is pacified. Once the corpses
in the garden have decomposed. Once the wild dogs have finished off the bones.
Does the war ever end. Is this the war of all against all.
Who will build the great wall between us, the illegals, the vigilantes, the evangelicals
or the ones who come back from Fallujah with four limbs and attached head.
And the Supercenter in Teotihuacán. Is it not quietly being built at the skirt
of the pyramids. Will the great job of the future be The Greeter.
Thus did Montezuma open his arms to Cortés.
In a gesture Prescott referred to as Montezuma’s nonresistance to evil.
Thus did one terrible story begin to unfold. De costumbre.



Politics are an aspect
Business is good
We are rushing to meet the demands of our lives
How do you want your chicken
Philosophy isn’t transcendent
Who told you that
The imagination has been tamed
Friendship is irrelevant
Fragile is life
Everyone is alone here
History disappears
Quality cannot be controlled
All bets are off

As of Wednesday morning 2,845 of our members completed the Circle of Life
Epidemiologists from here and there estimate 600,000 civilian dead
About 15,000 a month, a number swiftly dismissed by the White House

Just once I’d like to watch a movie up here that contains violence graphic language torture simulated sex cruelty to animals rape library-burning white-phosphrous shelling illegal military recruiting wanton profiteering artifact-looting and more

What I want is a closed-caption-surround-sound-UV-protected Armageddon

Rage could be my issue

C. D. WRIGHT, from her 2009 Griffin Poetry Prize-winning collection Rising, Falling, Hovering Copper Canyon Press, 2008.

Re: Happiness, in pursuit thereof
Photo: zoriah_graffiti_latrine_toilette_soldier_war_iraq_diary by Zoriah on flickr

A Short Essay on Poetry

What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurable acute melancholia redeemed only by affection.

A poet who observes his own poetry ends up, in spite of it, by finding nothing to observe, just as a man who pays too much attention to the way he walks, finds his legs walking off from under him. Nevertheless, poets must sometimes look at themselves in order to remember what they are risking. What I see as poetry is a sample of the human scene, its incurable acute melancholia redeemed only by affection. This sample of endurance is innocent and gay: the music of the vowel and consonant is the happy-go-lucky echo of time itself. Without this music there is simply no poem. It borrows further gayety by contrast with the burden it carries—for this exquisite lilt, this dance of sound, must be married to a responsible intelligence before there can occur the poem. Naturally, they are one: meanings and music, metaphor and thought. In the course of poetry’s career, perhaps new awarenesses are discovered, really new awarenesses and not verbal combinations brought together in any old way. This rather unimportant novelty is sometimes a play of possibility and sometimes a genuinely new insight: like Tristram Shandy, they add something to this Fragment of Life.

DAVID SCHUBERT, A Short Essay on Poetry

Photo: james roscoe, cock worship – paulmorristim on flickr

“I like to be mystified.”

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

“Lines for Winter,” from New Selected Poems by Mark Strand, © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand.

_____

I like to be mystified. Because it’s really that place which is unreachable, or mysterious, at which the poem becomes ours, finally, becomes the possession of the reader. I mean, in the act of figuring it out, of pursuing meaning, the reader is absorbing the poem, even though there’s an absence in the poem. But he just has to live with that. And eventually, it becomes essential that it exists in the poem, so that something beyond his understanding, or beyond his experience, or something that doesn’t quite match up with his experience, becomes more and more his. He comes into possession of a mystery, you know—which is something we don’t allow ourselves in our lives.

I mean, we live with mystery, but we don’t like the feeling. I think we should get used to it. We feel we have to know what things mean, to be on top of this and that. I don’t think it’s human, you know, to be that competent at life. That attitude is far from poetry.

Poet, MARK STRAND, interviewed by Wallace Shawn in his Essays.

Poetic search

Somehow poetry and the search for a more just order on earth are not contradictory, and rational thought and dreams are not contradictory, and there may be something necessary, as well as ridiculous, in the odd activity of racing back and forth on the bridge between reality and the world of dreams.

WALLACE SHAWN from his “Introduction” to Essays.

The explanation of what?

“If I could tell you I would let you know.”

Unfortunately, I’m not very good at “explaining” my work. I once tried to do this in a question-and-answer period with some students of my friend Richard Howard, after which he told me: “They wanted the key to your poetry, but you presented them with a set of new locks.” That sums up for me my feelings on the subject of “unlocking” my poetry. I’m unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled. I know this isn’t going to satisfy anybody and will probably be taken as another form of arrogance from an off-putting poet. On occasions when I have tried to discuss the meanings of my poems, I have found that I was inventing plausible-sounding ones which I knew to be untrue. That does seem to me to be something like arrogance. In any case, as a poet who cares very much about having an audience, I’m sorry about the confusion I have involuntarily helped to cause; in the words of W. H. Auden, “If I could tell you, I would let you know.”

JOHN ASHBERY, Other Traditions ; Cambridge, MA : Harvard UP, 2000.

Photo: Kirby, Justus, 2009.

Because

Poets (be generous) prefer to conceal the truth beneath strata of irony because this is the look of the truth: layered and elusive.

ANNE CARSON

Artist: RENE RICARD, But You Love Me…, 2003.

Hard

This line is stripped of emotion.
This line is no more than an
illustration of a European
theory. This line is bereft
of a subject. This line
has no reference apart
from its context in
this line. This line
is only about itself.
This line has no meaning:
its words are imaginary, its
sounds inaudible. This line
cares not for itself or for
anyone else—it is indifferent,
impersonal, cold, uninviting.
This line is elitist, requiring,
to understand it, years of study
over esoteric treatises on
impossible to pronounce topics.
This line refuses reality.



CHARLES BERNSTEIN, from The Republic of Reality



Difficult poems are normal. They are not incoherent, meaningless, or hostile. Wellmeaning readers may have suggested that “something must be wrong” with the poem. So let’s get a new perspective. “Difficult” is very different from abnormal. In today’s climate, with an increasing number of poems being labeled “difficult,” this is an important distinction to keep in mind.

Bastard angel

 
“People expect, as I did, the famous writers and poets to be just open and wonderfully giving, and they were not. They all wanted to go to bed with me.”*

The fiery force is nothing more than the life force as we know it. It is the flame of desire and love, of sex and beauty, of pleasure and joy as we consume and are consumed, as we burn with pleasure and burn out in time.

HAROLD NORSE, from his preface, In the Hub of the Fiery Force: Collected Poems, 1934-2003. New York : Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003.

*Okay, maybe it’s me, but I can’t imagine anything more “open and wonderfully giving” then someone expressing their want/interest/desire “to go to bed with me.”  Thanks for the memoirs, Harold.

Photo: ChicosVegas

It Doesn’t Get Better

“Poetry itself contains as much energy as a Hollywood industry, as much energy as a stage play on Broadway. All it needs is practitioners who are alive to bring it alive. Poetry has always been said to be a private hidden art….The reason it is not appreciated is because it hasn’t shown any dance, any guts, any moxy.” 

 

 

[The fucking brilliant] JOHN GIORNO at the Bowery Poetry Club, 28/02/09.

Thanks for Nothing

Just Say NO to Family Values

A mouth.

 

All I have is a voice/To undo the folded lie.*

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

 

W. H. AUDEN from his elegy for William Butler Yeats

Photo: Marrow Mouth, originally uploaded by tommy forbes.

*Auden, September 1,1939