Weather of the Body

2011-07-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

Responsibility

It is the responsibility of society to let the poet be a poet
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets you can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy
to hang out and prophesy
It is the responsibility of the poet not to pay war taxes
It is the responsibility of the poet to go in and out of ivory
towers and two-room apartments on Avenue C
and buckwheat fields and army camps
It is the responsibility of the male poet to be a woman
It is the responsibility of the female poet to be a woman
It is the poet's responsibility to speak truth to power as the
Quakers say
It is the poet's responsibility to learn the truth from the
powerless
It is the responsibility of the poet to say many times: there is no
freedom without justice and this means economic
justice and love justice
It is the responsibility of the poet to sing this in all the original
and traditional tunes of singing and telling poems
It is the responsibility of the poet to listen to gossip and pass it
on in the way storytellers decant the story of life
There is no freedom without fear and bravery there is no
freedom unless
earth and air and water continue and children
also continue
It is the responsibility of the poet to be a woman to keep an eye on
this world and cry out like Cassandra, but be
listened to this time.

-Grace Paley

2010-10-28T01:52:00.001-07:00

A bouquet
by Bei Dao (tr.?)

Between me and the world
You are a day, a sail
The faithful ends of a rope
You are a fountain, a wind
A shrill childhood cry

Between me and the world
You are a picture frame, a window
A field covered with wild flowers
You are a breath, a bed
A night that keeps the stars company

Between me and the world
You are a calendar, a compass
A ray of light that slips through the gloom
You are a biographical sketch, a bookmark
A preface that comes at the end

Between me and the world
You are a gauze curtain, a mist
A lamp shining into my dreams
You are a bamboo flute, a song without words
A closed eyelid carved in stone

Between me and the world
You are a chasm, a pool
An abyss plunging down
You are a balustrade, a wall
A shield’s eternal pattern.

2010-03-03T12:13:00.001-08:00

BOB HICOK'S NEW BOOK
http://www.amazon.com/Words-Empty-Full-Pitt-Poetry/dp/082296077X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267647164&sr=8-2

Mehr Licht by Tim Dlugos

2010-03-02T00:05:00.000-08:00

Mehr Licht

BY TIM DLUGOS

were the last words

of Goethe on his

deathbed as the darkness

closed around him.

But Mayor Licht

was also the chief

executive of Providence,

Rhode Island in the early

Eighties. I’m dreaming

of the best political

commercial of all time—

Weimar in the 1830s,

Goethe gasping “Mehr licht,

mehr licht”—and suddenly

Mayor Harry Licht of Providence

appears to pump the paw

of the poet, and save the day.

Mehr Licht by Tim Dlugos : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Seventh Avenue - Mark Halliday

2010-03-01T23:35:00.000-08:00

SEVENTH AVENUE

by, Mark Halliday

Late Tuesday afternoon the romantic self weaves

up Seventh Avenue amid too many lookers, too many

feelers: romance hates democracy;

how can you be so great and golden inside

if your trunk is shouldered among other trunks

block after block, block after block--

you can't help glimpsing an otherness in others

that is not just surface: they ache,

their aches ache away north and south all Tuesday

in murmurous torsos like yours . . .

What apprehension blossoms even now in Manuel

shifting steaks at the ten-foot grill of Charley O's

beneath the towering chef's hat they make him wear?

When I was twenty I'd have written

that he was only thinking of Cadillacs and sex;

now I'm afraid he's just as worried as I am

about love vs. lesser things and the point of it all.

Manuel, stay there at the sizzling grill till midnight

and then just drink or sleep, man,

don't write poems--

do me that favor. It's loud enough already

out here on Seventh Avenue with that cat's boom box

and these three giggle girls being Madonna together

and that guy hawking wind-up titans wielding laser lances.

Who's Wordsworth for any extended period on Seventh Ave?

In this pre-dusk traffic you catch the hint

that Manuel and thou if seers at all are seers only

for seconds--now the steak, taxi, buttocks, headline

and wallet resume their charismatic claim to be what counts.

Soul on Seventh is a sometime on-off quick-flip thing . . .

What I want is a poem long as Seventh Avenue

to sprinkle gold on every oppressed minority,

every young woman's subtly female hips,
every sad and suspicious American face

and the quiddity of every mud-tracked pizza shop;

proving, block after block, stanza by stanza
that I'm not just one skinny nervous pedestrian

but the one who matters because he sees and says.

I want that. The Avenue grins and says
"You want, that? How does it feel to want?"

A Brief for the Defense - Jack Gilbert

2010-03-01T23:18:00.000-08:00

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

-Jack Gilbert

Envoy by, Maurice Manning

2010-03-01T22:53:00.001-08:00

Envoy
by, Maurice Manning

Man who believes television
is the mouthpiece of the devil,
seeks female with similar views.

Attention all ladies who like
biscuits: man has gristmill
and two or three acres of wheat.

Are you a woman cast out from society?
Man with thirty-seven acres
and big muscles can provide refuge.

Would like to find sober woman (beer okay),
interested in pick-up trucks, old-time
Gospel music, buffalo trails.

Grown man who likes red dogs
and skipping rocks, hoping against
hope some woman likes same.

Man who lives several hundred
years in the past would like to find
woman zealous for spinning wheels.

Eccentric (?) gentleman (negotiable)—
tinker/farmer searching the heavens
for the true spark of love (breast-size unimportant). Please.

To Elsie by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

2010-02-25T18:22:00.000-08:00

To Elsie by William Carlos Williams : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

from the previous blog

2010-02-25T18:03:00.001-08:00

Resolutions In A Parked Car02/24/2010

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After I’m done pleading with the steering wheel,
after I’m done screaming at the white doors
of the Friendship Inn, no, even while I’m spitting

and howling, I know, yes, this is the way
we find out about ourselves: crying in rental cars
in parking lots in strange cities that are already

too familiar. The huge ship in front of you,
don’t you hope it will soon disembark? Don’t you
hate hotels? Don’t you hate to travel

just to see the same old pockmarks and limps,
the weight carried below the waist
and above? Just look at what we have done

to ourselves, and topped it off with a club sandwich,
a scribble of neon. I’m wailing
like some foreigner in a foreign country

we don’t give a shit about because how could we
understand something as subtle as the mutilation
of ears and lips? Please, I beg you,

perform some crazy rite over me so things can either
finally dissolve or finally become solid.
Please, I need something primitive and complex

to relieve me of this world subdivided into better
and better ways to avoid life. Sicker
and sicker ways. Death cruising
down 90. Laughing. Sweetheart, Death is the least of it.

I’m in a parking lot in Spokane reintroducing myself
to myself. I’m feeling like throwing up.
In a parking lot in Spokane I am resolving

to read Nietzsche, to pierce and tattoo myself,
in a parking lot I’m determining things
about my labia and nose and heart.

- Olena Kalytiak Davis

Post Title.02/20/2010

1 Comment(s)

MAYAKOVSKY

1
My heart's aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it's throbbing!

then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.

2
I love you. I love you,
but I'm turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.

Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,

and I'll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.

Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick

with bloody blows on its head.
I embraced a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.

3
That's funny! there's blood on my chest
oh yes, I've been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

FRANK O'HARA

SHE WHO TURNS HER HEAD01/28/2010

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SHE WHO TURNS HER HEAD

She turns her head
to breathe the morning air
bright April on her
   pale face
and yellow hair

Hey look! they turn
from their horseplay
Look! reminiscent of the
   night
striking by day

As one who has come
from dancing
half naked under lights
   she plucks
her clothes about her
and fights to seem
indifferent before the
overpowering mastery
   of this
garish dream

-William Carlos Williams

parts of Theodore Roethke's North American Sequence01/10/2010

2 Comment(s)

North American Sequence


THE LONGING

1

On things asleep, no balm:
A kingdom of stinks and sighs,
Fetor of cockroaches, dead fish, petroleum,
Worse than castoreum of mink or weasels,
Saliva dripping from warm microphones,
Agony of crucifixion on barstools.
   Less and less the illuminated lips,
   Hands active, eyes cherished;
   Happiness left to dogs and children--
   (Matters only a saint mentions!)
Lust fatigues the soul.
How to transcend this sensual emptiness?
(Dreams drain the spirit if we dream too long.)
In a bleak time, when a week of rain is a year,
The slag-heaps fume at the edge of the raw cities:
The gulls wheel over their singular garbage;
The great trees no longer shimmer;
Not even the soot dances.

And the spirit fails to move forward,
  But shrinks into a half-life, less than itself,
Falls back, a slug, a loose worm
Ready for any crevice,
An eyeless starer.

2

A wretch needs his wretchedness. Yes.
O pride, thou art a plume upon whose head?

How comprehensive that felicity! . . .
A body with the motion of a soul.
What dream's enough to breathe in? A dark dream.
The rose exceeds, the rose exceeds us all.
Who'd think the moon could pare itself so thin?
A great flame rises from the sunless sea;
The light cries out, and I am there to hear--
I'd be beyond; I'd be beyond the moon,
Bare as a bud, and naked as a worm.

To this extent I'm a stalk.
  --How free; how all alone.
Out of these nothings
  --All beginnings come.

3

I would with the fish, the blackening salmon, and the mad lemmings,
The children dancing, the flowers widening.
Who sighs from far away?
I would unlearn the lingo of exasperation, all the distortions of malice
   and hatred;
I would believe my pain: and the eye quiet on the growing rose;
I would delight in my hands, the branch singing, altering the excessive
   bird;
I long for the imperishable quiet at the heart of form;
I would be a stem, winding between great striated rocks in the late
   summer;
A leaf, I would love the leaves, delighting in the redolent disorder of
   this mortal life,
This ambush, this silence,
Where shadow can change into flame,
And the dark be forgotten.
I have left the body of the whale, but the mouth of the night is still
   wide;
On the bullhead, in the Dakotas, where the eagles eat well,
In the country of few lakes, in the tall buffalo grass at the base of the
   clay buttes.
In the summer heat, I can smell the dead buffalo,
The stench of their damp fur drying in the sun,
The buffalo chips drying.

  Old men should be explorers?
  I'll be an Indian.
  Ogalala?
  Iroquois.

MEDITATION AT OYSTER RIVER

1

Over the low, barnacled, elephant-colored rocks,
Come the first tide-ripples, moving almost without sound, toward
   me,
Running along the narrow furrows of the shore, the rows of dead clam
   shells;
Then a runnel behind me, creeping closer,
Alive with tiny striped fish, and young crabs climbing in and out of
   the water.

No sound from the bay. No violence.
Even the gulls quiet on the far rocks,
Silent, in the deepening light,
Their cat-mewing over,
Their child-whimpering.

At last one long undulant ripple,
Blue-black from where I am sitting,
Makes almost a wave over a barrier of small stones,
Slapping lightly against a sunken log.
I dabble my toes in the brackish foam sliding forward,
Then retire to a rock higher up on the cliff-side.
The wind slackens, light as a moth fanning a stone:
A twilight wind, light as a child's breath
Turning not a leaf, not a ripple.
The dew revives on the beach-grass;
A fish raven turns on its perch (a dead tree in the rivermouth),
Its wings catching a last glint of the reflected sunlight.

2

The self persists like a dying star,
In sleep, afraid. Death's face rises afresh,
Among the shy beasts, the deer at the salt-lick,
The doe with its sloped shoulders loping across the highway,
The young snake, poised in green leaves, waiting for its fly,
The hummingbird, whirring from quince-blossom to morning-glory--
With these I would be.
And with water: the waves coming forward, without cessation,
The waves, altered by sand-bars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous driftwood,
Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents
The tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,
The tongues of water, creeping in, quietly.

3

In this hour,
In this first hour of knowing,
The flesh takes on the pure poise of spirit,
Acquires, for a time, the sandpiper's insouciance,
The hummingbird's surety, the kingfisher's cunning--
I shift on my rock, and I think:
Of the first trembling of a Michigan brook in April,
Over a lip of stone, the tiny rivulet;
And that wrist-thick cascade tumbling from a cleft rock,
Its spray holding a double rain-bow in early morning,
Small enough to be taken in, embraced by two arms,--
Or the Tittebawasee, in the time between winter and spring,
When the ice melts along the edges in early afternoon.
And the midchannel begins cracking and heaving from the pressure
   beneath,
The ice piling high against the iron-bound spikes,
Gleaming, freezing hard again, creaking at midnight--
And I long for the blast of dynamite,
The sudden sucking roar as the culvert loosens its debris of branches
   and sticks,
Welter of tin cans, pails, old bird nests, a child's shoe riding a log,
As the piled ice breaks away from the battered spiles,
And the whole river begins to move forward, its bridges shaking.

4

Now, in this waning of light,
I rock with the motion of morning;
In the cradle of all that is,
I'm lulled into half-sleep
By the lapping of water,
Cries of the sandpiper.

Water's my will, and my way,
And the spirit runs, intermittently,
In and out of the small waves,
Runs with the intrepid shorebirds--
How graceful the small before danger!

In the first of the moon,
All's a scattering,
A shining.