Mounting Parnassus

Write What You Know

2005-01-04T20:51:00.000-06:00

“Write what you know” is the dictum. What if I, like Socrates have come to realize that all I know is nothing? How does a writer write about nothing without copying Jerry Seinfeld or the eight-fold path of Buddha? Is there a way to write nothing and have it make sense? Is there a formula for enlightenment that assures salvation?

Quiet words, understated lines running like mascara in the rain, these are best. The flagrant sentences of Charles Baudelaire and Bukowski; the hanged men of desperate generations seeking signs between the sheets of sin soaked turns of a phrase. That’s what made them great. Simple integrity to the art of being, not being great, only being present in the individual moment of a poem. Writing nothing.

Too often I attempt to ascribe greatness to my words when none is merited. If I could but keep it simple and direct to the point of being minimal and somehow allow any concept of ego to disappear on the page, then perhaps I would be able to write of the grand nothing. Honesty of expression, not the popular contrivance of a situation comedy or top 40 bubble gum pop song, but the brutality of an Animal Planet “Lions of the Savannah” documentary; that is poetry of the type I want to write.

Snapshots and moments strung in sequence to bring understanding of the world’s smallness. Nothingness. Did the Confessional poets like Sexton, Berryman and Plath begin what has been updated by the writers of reality television? Is this NOTHING or only the modern equivalent of spectators at the coliseum?

Some questions have no answers but only leave me with more questions. I doubt that I will ever achieve critical acclaim for my words. I don’t know if I will ever find my “voice” as a writer, but I will keep trying, and I will attempt to eliminate the personal pronouns whenever possible and replace them with others that speak to the universal stuff of lions on the Savannah. It’s a start.

Mellow dispatches from 'tiny rooms and old typewriters'

2005-01-04T06:45:00.000-06:00

Mellow dispatches from 'tiny rooms and old typewriters':

"Charles Bukowski has been dead for a decade, but you'd never know it from the fat volumes of his new poems published every other year. This latest posthumous collection, 'Slouching Toward Nirvana' -- the third of five to be edited by former Black Sparrow publisher John Martin, to whom Bukowski entrusted his literary estate -- finds Bukowski just as full of spit and vinegar as ever in his unsparing portraits of bar brawls, dead-end jobs, racetrack betting and all manner of bums, broads and riffraff. "

The book isn't scheduled for release until February but you can reserve a copy at amazon.com for about $10 off list.

Here's a Bukowski Homage I did in a series called aptly enough,
The Bukowski Papers

Dreaming Blue Dresses
And Yellow Suns 6:45am

The gently beating
thud of the typer
lulls me, moves me

with the rhythm
of a favorite
lover who I know

will be gone at
daybreak. Only
elbow dents

on the mattress &
lipstick smears on
a fallen snifter

betray.

Sunrise at the
corner of Lost Souls
and Howling Hearts

drive spikes
slowly as to take
full effect over

breakfast. Symphonies
for one. Eggs oozing
yolky stars beaten

again at another 6:45am
in another day clouded
over with ‘what could’ve

been.’

Poem for my Father's Birthday

2005-01-03T02:35:00.000-06:00

Happy birthday, dad! I am glad you quit smoking but here's a childhood memory for your present today. Hope you like it.

Father’s Pipe

The corncobs and the briarwoods,
Meerschaums, and Calabash untested for bite or plume,
Tarred and trusted friends; an adolescent’s signposts
For the unknown world of manhood

These were my father’s treasures. His pipes
Broken, bent, some taped at the knob joint
Others shoved into side pockets of Carhardt
Work jackets or the front of Dickie pants.

Little welts rising on the thigh where red hot
Chimneys still glowed. Black soot palms with
Yellow stain fingers, heat calloused and fever
Blistered after years of smoking at the mill.

He would pack his bowls with sawdust when times
Were tough, exhaling a miniature forest fire
Like a dragon taking flight, or more like the
Ragged exhaust of his ’78 GMC pick-up truck

That we loaded fat with cords of wood each weekend. Delivering readymade campfires to the tourists of
Southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois was a
Saturday ritual. A time of family bonding singed in The aroma of cherry, apple, maple and pine.

Fallen trees and Tobacco smoke rising together so that In my twelve-Year-old nose I hardly knew where one Stopped and the other began. Much like my childhood, When I stole sacred fire from my father’s

Favorite briar bowl and took that first hit for Myself. My lips felt strange touching the place where His teeth marks left anxious tracks on the stem. My Breath was a billow for the spark of a match as I Watched the gleaming

Heart of the firmly packed stash beat brighter with Every puff. The chambers of my lungs filled like one About to drown, my eyes stung seared with smoke.
I thought I was going to die but at least I thought Myself a man.

The Hope of Minds at Play: Happy New Year

2004-12-31T19:04:00.000-06:00

The Hope of Minds at Play

No parties here tonight but many a well worn laugh
Through years odd spent and captured in the draught.

What becomes of memory once Father Time has spent
All the currency of exchange that, lo, his scythe has rent?

We have the photos caught ere now, don’t forget the books.
We have the furrowed brow of age and babe’s expectant looks

To anchor fast the lifelong sway mounting ever higher, yet
Pictures lie and words betray; makes history out a liar.

Best to put these thoughts to bed, arise another day,
When change has come to set aright the hope of minds at play

++
New Year’s Eve of 1990 I married my second wife. It was an ad hoc ceremony performed at a small chapel in the basement of the Bexar Co. courts building used to accommodate military personnel who were too horny or impatient for government monies to kick in and pay for off-base housing or impending pregnancies.

It was a wedding of convenience after all. Though I lied to myself, thinking that I was really in love. Amee and I divorced in 1995 after a three-year separation. Yet, to this day, I think back on that night and remember the fireworks that lit the skies of San Antonio in celebration of the New Year, and I smile.

I smile for the smell of her Exclamation perfume, the taste of escargot we fed to each other during our private dinner, the early winter afternoons spent in swimming pools, and the fact that neither of us (both active duty Air Force) were sent to Saudi Arabia. I smile for the poems and the life that we shared, and for the person she was: vain, foul-mouthed, unashamed, at once both brazen and afraid. Can it be that we were too much the shadow of one another?
That happens sometimes.

Happy Anniversary, Amee. I hope life has treated you kindly!

Time

Time can play funny tricks on you
And your eyes don’t see like they used to
And your mind can play funny games on you
And your heart might miss a beat or two

I don’t know what it is that's going wrong
It all feels the same – just more far away
And I don’t know why it takes so long
It all feels the same – just more far away

And you are mine in my dreams
While our lives split at the seams
We’re alright, so we’re told
But we live our lives apart, growing old

Time can play funny tricks on you
And your eyes don’t see like they used to
And your mind can play funny games on you
And your heart might miss a beat or two

2004-12-31T01:12:00.000-06:00

Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May -J.W. Waterhouse

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

2004-12-31T01:03:00.000-06:00

Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he's a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
You may forever tarry.

2004-12-31T00:51:00.000-06:00

I remember a conversation with my mother in which we discussed the words “good bye.” Seems that she and my father would not say this parting phrase to each other for the entire time they were together; twenty-one years. They chose only to say “bye.” Putting the ‘good’ in front of it gave a note of finality to the expression, or so my mom told me.After my parents divorced they did say, “good bye.” They have rarely spoken since and that was 14 years ago.

My own experience with “good bye” has been varied and multiplied. I have said “good bye” to one brother, two parents, three wives, four grandparents, five dollar packs of cigarettes, six-packs of beer by the score, seven years of bad luck (5 times over), eight tiny reindeer, nine lives I didn’t know I had, ten years ofdrunkenness, eleven pet dogs, twelve-packs of cheap buzz beer (more often than I can count), a baker’s dozen of careers, fourteen teeth…and now, one more year’s worth of months turned down like cool sheets on a fresh made bed.

Yes, 2004 is all but kicked in the head. I bid it a fond farewell, Godspeed, adieu. May it lick my boots and find the taste to its liking; 2005 is nipping at my heels and I must learn to say, “hello” before it is too late for “good bye.”So, here’s to looking up your old address and wishing you the best of all possible years to be all that you have never been, and to the moment that never ends but waits forever to begin.

2004-12-30T18:35:00.000-06:00

Stranded at an exhibition

I want to find a fold of flesh,
curl up and crawl inside, move
around like a thieving raccoon
picking the gates of the Louvre.

What secret would I discover
here in this quiet hole?
What treasures locked away?

The masked guest, uninvited
unsheathes his silver pallet
knife drawing sfumato scenery
down to a smile.

Your gallery is closing
marking the end of my
welcome. I escape without
knowing or touching or
taking anything but time.

_____________________++

For Claude

His smashed yellow sun-
scorpion of understanding
shrugs off whipping post

visions.

Monet spiked acid-
fermented his soul &
blood; gave us gasoline
ghosts to call our own
tethered by starlight.

Yellow cuts-
sighs,
yawns,
fades,
becomes invisible.

Haunts someone else’s sky.

Marking the Legacies of Writers Lost in 2004

2004-12-29T00:30:00.000-06:00

Despite the fame that some writers achieve, most pass away with little fanfare. Alan Cheuse remembers writers who died this year, with help from poet George Garrett, who reads his poem "Anthologies." Click on the link to go to the NPR page which has a real player download of the 4.5 minute airing.

The Prettiest Handwriting Of Any Man

2004-12-29T00:12:00.000-06:00

I’ve thinking about the notebooks that poets read their words from at poetry gatherings. I have seen everything from a folded up piece of napkin to elaborate leather binders; marbled cover school note pads to three ring ‘trapper keepers.’ The possibilities seems as diverse as the authors themselves. Yet, I wonder if the choice of paper, the decision for style (or the lack) of same is any indication of how much value the reader/writer places upon their efforts?

My personal choice has been to use a zippered notebook to read from. The pages are typed and protected by clear plastic sleeves so even if I were to spill something on them, cleaning would be a snap and the interior paper would not be ruined. I have also read from a photo album.
The photo album instead of having any pictures tucked within the inserts held my published poems. I put all my published poetry into the photo album. Again, the pages were protected and since the poetry already was deemed worthy of publication I would take this with me to the open-mic & featured reads and typically got a good response.

What I have NEVER done is read from my spiral notebooks or marbled cover school notebooks. Not that my handwriting is illegible, it has been said that I have the “prettiest handwriting of any man I’ve known.” The thing is that these notebooks are only for me. They are where I allow myself the freedom to make mistakes in spelling and where all the edits are made. Once the poetry in these gets typed and transferred a change takes place. The poem is done, for better or worse, I rarely continue to edit it.

I went to a local office supply shop today and was admiring the leather binders for sale. I thought maybe I would buy one to place my writing into. One that “looked important” one that “had the feel of quality and that the person who reads from this must really care about their words.” It was to become a new start for a new year. I decided against it. Not b/c they cost too much or b/c they weren’t worthy of my words but on account of what I considered the “pretentiousness factor.” All the poets I have ever met who read from such were very much full of themselves. I don’t want that to be my fate. I’ll stay with what I have been doing. It works for me.
________________________________________++

The Prettiest Handwriting of Any Man I’ve Known

Your Gs look like
something Shakespear
would write-
Or the woman
who in reality
was William
-The original Avon Lady.

And just look at
the W and that B!My God, have your
entire ABCs been contrived

from the pages
of some seventeenth
century parchments?

Nope, Sr. Mary Agnes
made me write like this
after demanding a reading
of The Taming of The Shrew.

Regrettably, I succeeded
in penmanship but failed
miserably in pentameter!

Perhaps it would make you
less jealous if I revamped
my writing style to reflect
Campbell’s wonderful text
in a can of alphabet soup?

Speaking of Emily

2004-12-28T23:10:00.000-06:00

Emily Dickinson

There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons--
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes--

Heavenly Hurt,it gives us--
We can find no scar,
But internal difference,
Where the Meanings, are--

None may teach it--Any--
'Tis the Seal Despair--
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air--

When it comes, the Landscape listens--
Shadows--hold their breath--
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death--

A View From A Room: Ghost Dancer

2004-12-28T01:41:00.000-06:00

Hanging on the wall of my writing room are 2 collages that I have created to express the “inner me.” The one I am focusing on is entitled GHOST DANCE. It has a native American in full regalia ceremonially dancing in black and white and sepia tones. There is the snarling head of a black panther in a corner and a black-beaked albino crow in another. Completing the frame is an angelic image clipped from a magazine that featured Greek sculpture.

The total effect is otherworldly. It puts me in mind of Halloween and death. Death and life seem to be regular themes in my art. They appear in my poetry along with my collages. They come to me in dreams and in my nightmares.It makes me wonder if I wasn’t a prophet or an assassin in a past life. Not that I believe in past lives for humans. Still, it makes me wonder what influence is at work here.

Maybe I was a priest or a shaman? I seem to gravitate toward the metaphysical and religious side of life and death and what is or could be beyond this mortal coil.
Not that I think I am special or anything. Just more inclined than most to ask the ‘big questions.’ Now, if I could only get some ‘big answers!’ You know, I doubt there are any ‘BIG answers.’ Merely many little ones. Answers that come to us and make living make sense: in the smile of a stranger, the slant of morning light, the angle of rain, the dropping a coin into the charity box these are the important answers. The small answers that come from the interior feeling of accomplishing something worth being human when doing a good deed, being nice, and being the friend a friend would like to have.

As 2oo5 approaches I want to be more aware of how my life impacts those I meet. I want to dance with the living and the dead. Experience the ghostly DNA of the dancers and poets and priests and shamans who went before me and all those who will come after I have played my part and added my voice to the current chorus. A new year and a new beginning drawn from the well of all that has past and all that will ever be.

“We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.”
-Robert Frost
____________________________++

Dances With Ghosts

Where did you go
grandfather? Why
did the buffalo
die? We all die

become smoke

a blanket

of bones.

Chasing shadows
hunting suns brandishing
feathers of fire my
name has changed

I am now

Growing With Flowers.
Smoking With Guns.
Dreaming With Daggers.
He who Dances With Ghosts.

California, home of 'beat' poets, seeks official bard

2004-12-28T01:36:00.000-06:00

LOS ANGELES – Arts programs are kaput, libraries are being shuttered, K-12 education has plummeted, and literacy rates are down. And California has been without a state bard for nearly two years.

Q: Who ya gonna call?
A: Somebody who can rhyme and doesn't need a dime.

_______________________________________++

So begins the article in the Christian Science Monitor by
Daniel B. Wood in the Dec. 27th edtion. It surprised me to read of the State of California's lack of artistic interest especially b/c of the association I make of it with Hollywood and the film industry. Certainly poetry and film are not synonymous but they are both artistic endeavors that in my mind would be best represented in the Golden State.

Although given the fact that the National Poet Laureate only receives a stipend of $35,000 /yr it shouldn't be too surprising to learn of the drought of interest among the states. Several of the 35 states that do have a PL position pay little or no monies to the honoree whatsoever. What does this say about us as a nation?

One of my favorite football players of all time died on Sunday. Reggie White of the Green Bay Packers & Philadelphia Eagles succumbed to a heart attack. My point being that this story made national news and that this man was widely regarded in his athletic career. He had celebrity,something that cannot be said about too many poets.

I wish I knew when the focus changed from valuing the arts to emphasizing athletes. It just seems wrong to me that million(s) dollar contracts get paid to these gamesmen & nary a living wage can be paid to our most prestigious wordsmiths.

Perhaps I can take some solace in knowing that the modern bards of top 40 music and those fortunate enough to make the big bucks in the acting industry are still out there plying their trades for the masses. Still, for every singing super-star/American Idol, and for every Academy Award winner their must me hundreds if not thousands of starving artists just waiting to be "discovered."

We artists do what we do mostly out of love for the art. Until our culture radically changes I don't foresee any watershed moments arriving. Sad.

Nature praised in poetry, appreciated in person

2004-12-28T00:58:00.000-06:00

BY TOM CONROY
Minnesota Department of Natural Resources

It's that time of year when the words of poet laureate Robert Frost come to mind. While holiday verses dance in the minds of others, I recall the words of Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

was first introduced to Frost's poem many years ago. While I wasn't much of a poetry fan then, this poem struck a chord. It wasn't until a snowy night years later, however, that the words took on a much deeper meaning.

It was late on a Christmas Eve. Circumstances had me alone. A light snow was falling as I drove into the country, listening to carols on the radio, immersed in melancholy. In the dark night, with no particular place to go, I gravitated toward the sparkling lights of various farmsteads. As I passed each lit-up farmhouse, I wondered about who was gathered inside and what they might be doing.

Then, sometime later, I found myself on a narrow road, a lane really, with woods on both sides. It was snowing harder now.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

I stopped the car and turned down the radio. For a while, I just sat there, watching. And then I got out.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flakes.

Snowflakes melted on my cheeks and hair as I continued to watch and listen. The wind in the treetops occasionally caused limbs to rub together, creating supernatural sounds in the dark woods. I could feel the sharp eyes of the night staring at me.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep.

There is something restorative in the solitude of nature. Watching those woods fill up with snow, listening to the mysterious sounds of the night, feeling eyes in the dark upon me, chased the melancholy away on that Christmas Eve night. What is it about the healing spirit of nature?

"The tradesman, the attorney, comes out of the din and craft of the street and sees the sky and the woods, and is a man again. In their eternal calm, he finds himself again," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in 1836. Frost's poem and memories of that snowy night by the woods always come to mind this time of year.

I'm grateful we still have places where our natural resources have not yet been abused, wasted or destroyed altogether.

We've spent more than 200 years in this country doing our best to "conquer" nature. Hopefully, we'll stop before we beat it to death.

Watching a parking lot fill up with snow just isn't quite the same.

Tom Conroy is a conservation officer with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

Boxing Emily

2004-12-26T13:01:00.000-06:00

Emily Dickinson, Poet

I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you--Nobody--too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise--you know!

How dreary--to be--Somebody!
How public--like a Frog--
To tell one's name--the livelong June--
To an admiring Bog!

-Emily Dickinson

_______________________________________++

It was 3:oo am when the words of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m nobody! Who are you” occurred to me. I thought, WOW, now here’s a poem that could be brought into the 2ist century! So I played around with it, turned it on its head and this is what we have to show for the effort. Happy Boxing Day!

I’m a somebody! Are you too?
Are you -- with me -- boiling
In the slue? Then we are large
-- Let our voice be raised! --
Our words be heard -- It’s the
Least that we can do!

How wondrous -- to be somebody!
Would that all were made so free--
To write and sing and shout--
How public -- like the smog!
To portray our wit -- our poetry
To the world of blog--!

Letter: A Yuletide poem for peace

2004-12-26T11:46:00.000-06:00

To the editor:

Friday, December 24, 2004

Let me say, that I have had the privilege of being in the "House of Peace" in Ipswich on a few occasions ("Peace is the word," Sunday, Dec. 12). Carrie and John Schuchardt are true humanitarians who practice what they preach.

Here we are nearing Christmas in this great country of ours, bustling around for this occasion. Yet, there are many people in this world who are faced with dire circumstances that make Christmas in the year 2004 just another bleak day in their lives.

War, terror and mayhem are the experiences of too many human beings due to the actions of a minority of powerful, greedy humans. These inconsiderate people have been playing a chess game of geopolitics, using ordinary people as pawns and sacrificial lambs. When will this demonic, foolish scenario of activity end in recognition of the need to preserve the lives of younger generations, and the preservation of the planet Earth itself?

The following poem of mine depicts my feelings for this Christmas season, and for the year 2005. I truly believe that all human beings have an inner spirituality. This inner spirituality can be nurtured so as to understand and recognize the obligation of all adults to fulfill their duty of preserving life on earth by promoting and securing Peace on Earth.

The Eyes of Children Plead for Compassion

Who named the great Pacific Ocean?
The enormous sea an ocean of peace,
Joining small and large land masses,
With people of many nations and ethnicity
OH! Grownups of mankind.
Can we set our hearts and minds
To the children under our care
And provide them with the serenity of peace?
Let us use our united wills.
Earnestly speaking with the cry of humanity.
Please, please, peace in this life time,
Release our innocent children from terror
And quarreling and unrequited hopes
That keeps the Family of God,
Fragmented into all the unfriendly factions.
If our Mother Earth and the races of mankind
Are to be united in peace,
It must be left to the Children of God
To impose their clear, trusting wisdom
Upon their very fatigued elders.
Without the children's pleading voices
And undiminished vision for the future,
There is nothing left, but austere time
And final ruin for all mankind.

Patrick Carrette
Ledgewood Way
Peabody

The Sky is Christmas-Gray

2004-12-25T14:15:00.000-06:00

Tammy once told me, “ you’ll be a famous writer after you’re dead.” To which I replied, “Yeah, gentleness is a posthumous honor.”

Today is Christmas 2oo4. Tammy left me sixteen years ago tomorrow. Enough water has gone under the proverbial bridge that I only think of her on special occasions. Christmas is special; special enough to remember the good times we shared. There are really more than I thought-
Isn’t that the way memory works? It’s a self-preservation mechanism built in to ensure that we don’t all kill ourselves at every traumatic event. . . .

I took Saber, my dog, for our morning walk today and was surprised to see a dusting of Christmas snow. The way it crunched underfoot was like walking on a beach of winter sand; frozen, almost timeless.

What I noticed most though was the sky. Illinois, at least my section of it seems to have only two colors of sky:
“Feel-Good-Blue” and “Christmas-Gray.” Sure, sure there are also times of cotton ball clouds and varying streaks of cirrus but they really aren’t worth mentioning. Heck, even the “feel-good-blue” isn’t what it was over Texas. Blue Texas skies were higher, bigger, more hopeful. But then that is probably just another trick my mind plays on me. I haven’t seen a Texas sky in years.

I call the color Christmas-Gray although it isn’t particular to the holiday. It just came to me during the walk. I get a lot of ideas during walks, or while sitting on the commode. I prefer the ones on walks. Actually, the gray skies of northern Illinois are constant throughout the year. We can have a Christmas-Gray sky in the middle of June or beginning of March or September. The sky doesn’t seem to keep time like we do.

Physically, Christmas-Gray is a low visibility ceiling. 5oo-1ooo feet with a sheer undercoat that hangs like smoke in a crowded bar room, only quieter.
Emotionally, it is a son of a bitch. Christmas-Gray is not to be found in a carton of Crayolas. It’s half-way between slate and silver. It doesn’t know if it is happy or sad, hopeful or full of remorse.

It is what it is: Christmas-Gray.

___________________________________++

I climbed the sky on Christmas
day and asked, Why you look so
sad? The sky replied, Tisn’t true
have you gone quite mad?

I walked the earth on Christmas
day and inquired of her, What makes
the sky so dour? Mother was silent
then replied, Come back later,
dear, when I can hold you longer.

I asked the river flowing dark,
Do you know why the sky’s this way?
But the Old Man wouldn’t say.

I then went home and lit a fire,
stoked it hot and bright and asked
the fire if it would tell the secret
of the sky. The fire coughed and cracked
and laughed with life and spoke a most
peculiar word:

Our friend, the sky is Christmas-Gray
half silver, half slate, all smoke. He
reflects you who live below torn
between hellish sorrow and heavenly hope.

You wingless angels should know by now
all answers are within. If you were nicer
to each other the sky would change his hue.

Christmas-Gray would disappear as would war
and death and pain.Our friend the sky would
have no need to cry,and become at once lovely Christmas-Blue.

Christmas 2004

2004-12-25T14:00:00.000-06:00

CHRISTMAS BELLS
-Henry Wadworth Longfellow

I heard the bells on Christmas Day

Their old, familiar carols play,

And wild and sweet

The words repeat

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,

And with the sound

The Carols drowned

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

And in despair I bowed my head;

'There is no peace on earth,' I said;

'For hate is strong,

And mocks the song

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!'

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep!

The Wrong shall fail,

The Right prevail,

With peace on earth, good-will to men!'

_______________________________++

The words are those of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His poem, "Christmas Bells," describes the difficulty of putting a joyous face on this most celebrated of Christian holidays during a time of war.

But the friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose most famous works include "The Song of Hiawatha" and "Evangeline," urged his readers not to despair for "'God is not dead; nor doth he sleep! The Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail.'"

This message of reassurance is as essential today as it was back in the 1860s when the armies of the North and the South fought over whether these would truly remain the United States or the two halves of the country would go their separate ways.

A century and a half later, we find ourselves involved in another civil war on the other side of the world. More than a thousand American men and women have died and many more have been seriously injured in the effort to bring the rewards of unity and democracy to the people of Iraq. That's the 'party line' on it. In truth and as the BBC has reported, "The United States and coalition forces are acting no better than terrorists themselves."

This will not be a joyous holiday season for the families of the 18 Americans, killed in a suicide attack on a U.S. Army base in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul on Tuesday 12. 21.04. All those who have died over the past year will be mourned as friends and relatives attend Christmas services or sit down to a family meal over the weekend. Families on both sides of the conflict will have the pain and only the memories of those who didn't come home. At least the Moslems won't have the added irony of the Christian holiday to contend with, not that it makes their sorrow any less poignant now or in the future.

This holiday season finds U.S. forces in Afghanistan and our Pakistani allies still searching for the mastermind of that operation, Osama bin Laden. And it has become painfully apparent that our mission in Iraq will not end anytime soon.

But these actions have also guaranteed that bin Laden's al-Qaida organization won't soon find another government like the former Taliban regime in Kabul willing to provide it with a safe haven.

The citizens of Afghanistan recently held democratic elections with a minimum of disruption and rather surprising level of public participation. And next door in Iraq, the former dictator Saddam Hussein awaits his trial as he writes "bad" poetry in a prison cell and plants his gardens (sorry, more irony).

Whether the Iraqi citizens are able to replicate the Afghan experience with their election scheduled for late next month remains very much an open question at this point. Certainly the Hussein loyalists who remain at large and others in the insurgency are doing their best to make sure that doesn't happen.

We've paid a heavy price in terms of lives and money already in an effort to bring democracy to a part of the world that has had little experience with a freely elected government. And the larger task of ending the deep religious and ethnic divides within a region known as "The Holy Land" — birthplace of Islam, Judaism and the son of God whose arrival on Earth that Christians celebrate today — is an immense one that has frustrated generations of statesmen and stateswomen. We are no different.

But that's no reason to stop striving for the everlasting peace we pray for every day, especially today.

I Believe in Father Christmas

2004-12-24T14:15:00.000-06:00

Greg Lake

(Greg Lake/ Peter Sinfield)

They said there'll be snow at Christmas,
They said there'll be peace on earth,
But instead it just kept on raining,
A veil of tears for the Virgin birth.

I remember one Christmas morning,
The Winter's light and a distant choir,
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell,
And eyes full of tinsel and fire.

They sold me a dream of Christmas,
They sold me a silent night,
They told me a fairy story,
'Til I believed in the Israelite.

And I believed in Father Christmas,
And I looked to the sky with excited eyes,
Then I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn,
And I saw him and through his disguise.

I wish you a hopeful Christmas,
I wish you a brave New Year,
All anguish, pain and sadness,
Leave your heart and let your road be clear.

They said there'd be snow at Christmas,
They said there'd be peace on earth,
Hallelujah! Noel!, be it Heaven or Hell,
The Christmas we get, we deserve.

_____________________________++

Greg Lake of the band Emerson Lake & Palmer wrote my favorite Christmas song. The first time I heard it was the Christmas season of 1985. I mean really 'heard' it. The song had played through the years before then but I was not open to the lyrics or the haunting melody.

Here's the Reader's Digest account of my experience. 1985 had me as a junior in high school, the Chicago Bears were Superbowl champions, and there was famine in Africa. Band Aid was popular that year with their song "Do they even know its Christmas?" If my memory serves, Bruce Springsteen released his "Santa Clause Is Coming To Town" that year as well.

There was at the time a local record store in my hometown. Nickelodeon was the name of the store. The owner's name was John.
I was a regular customer, spending what discretionary income I had on the vinyl records and cassette tapes that were quickly being made obsolete by the compact disc craze. In November, after Thanksgiving, I went into the Nick and spoke with John about making me a compilation Christmas recording. This certainly violated who knows how many ASCAP & BMI laws at the time, but John obliged. I think he charged me $5.00 for a 60 minute compilation.

What a compilation. John certainly knew his Christmas rock-n-roll.
The song list included such memorables as John Lennon's Happy Xmas (war is over), The Ban Aid tune mentioned above, Chuck Berry's Run Run Rudolf, Bruce Springsteen's Santa Clause is Coming to Town, Bob Seger's Little Drummer Boy, Pretty Paper by Roy Orbison, the classic Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer was on it along with several that I have since forgotten. The one that sticks like figgy pudding in my mind though is the Greg Lake song.

My seventeenth year was one of lost innocence. It was the year that I gave my virginity to the woman who I would two years later marry. Like over half of all marriages it ended poorly. The day after Christmas 1988 she didn't come home. She didn't come home for nearly 3 weeks. Other than crying in my egg-nog, I listened repeatedly to I Believe in Father Christmas ...the Christmas we get we deserve...

Christmas has been shot

2004-12-23T23:12:00.000-06:00

Benjamin Zephaniah, Poet

Christmas has been shot away this year,
There are too many choppers chopping up the sky
Too many bullets in the air for good tidings,
There will be no Christ and no mass
And darkness has fallen upon the land.
No one shall make a joyful noise unto the Lord
Or serve the Lord with gladness,
No one shall come before his presence with singing,
And Palestinian Christians who want to declare
The name of the Lord in Jerusalem
Or glorify the boy in Bethlehem
Have been told to piss off to Jordan,
Syria or Iraq.

All the saints have been told
To wait for the resumption of peace talks
And the angels of the Lord have been told
To wait until the Americans are ready
Because Zion means something else now,
And yes it was written that the truth shall flow
From the mouths of babe and suckling,
But babes and sucklings beware
The soldiers have orders to kill,
And the spirit of King Herod is alive.
They're not doing Christmas this year,
It has been shot away'And anyway
Christ is no messiah,' said the soldier
'This is our Promised Land. '

What we see over Bethlehem this year
Is a spineless, skeleton of a Christmas,
A Christmas that has been occupied, strangled
And driven to tears, crying tear gas and burning,
It's a Christmas that has no songs or sermons
Except the song of the bomber;
As loud as dying
As quiet as death.
Welcome to the birthplace of his holiness
Welcome to the humiliation of the natives,
Here even flowers are shot down
If they fly the local flag,
You will not hear the bells of Christmas
And you will not hear the women sing.
'And let me tell you something else,'
said the soldier
'No virgin gave birth here - we wouldn't allow it.'

Sorry gentiles
It looks like it's gonna be a cold Christmas,
Ain't no spirit of the Lord moving over the manger
Just a nuclear power
Flying in from Tel Aviv via Washington DC.
The power of the almighty has come for sure
To suck Christmas dryAnd to blow Christmas away.
There will be no mercyAnd no rejoicing
And no worshipping any little Black Palestinian boy,
And no crosses
And no three wise women or men
And no Arab shepherds,
Because Christmas has been done in
Christmas is coughing and choking
Christmas has been hit by bullets from the west,
So if you want to do Christmas this year
Take a bible,
Sit indoors,
And do your own thing,
Just don't do it in Bethlehem.

__________________________++

Millions of people know Benjamin Zephania's voice. The popular Rasta poet has given readings around the world, from Palestine to Argentina, as well as throughout the UK. Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah was born in Birmingham and grew up in Jamaica and in Handsworth. In 1989 he was nominated for Oxford Professor of Poetry. After a journey to Palestine, Zephaniah wrote a pamphlet entitled Rasta Time in Palestine (1990).

We present to you this evening Zephaniah's poem, "Christmas has been shot" which is included in his poetry collection, entitled "Too Black, Too Strong." (Too Black, Too Strong. Newcastle, Bloodaxe, 2001.) Zephaniah writes in his foreword to the collection: "the world is staying silent as the Palestinians are being annihilated" later he says: "I feel a sense of urgency here is a poet who won't stay silent." He explains the collection's title thus:

"When I say 'black' it means more than skin colour, I include Romany, Iraqi, Indians, Kurds, Palestinians, all those that are treated Black by the united white states. My 'strong' is the strength that we get when we stand up and get counted...When I say 'Too Black, Too Strong', I mean unity is strength, I mean 'true' free speech, I mean no justice, no peace."

Palestine Chronicle

2004-12-23T01:45:00.000-06:00

Palestine Chronicle:

O ghostly town of Bethlehem,
in curfew do you lie,

Your streets are dead, the people dread
to wander lest they die.

No pilgrims visit your hallowed square,
for Christians have been banned;

A crueler plight upon this night,
has ne'er on Earth been planned

- From Carols for Palestine

-Listen to the complete interviews:
http://www.me-radio.org/current/main.htm

A VISUAL POEM

2004-12-22T21:08:00.000-06:00

Want to create your own visual poetry?
Click on the link and have fun!

Its something different everytime.
Guaranteed to amuse the muse within.

yada yada yada

-w

Merry Christmas

We must all refuse an OBE, says poet

2004-12-22T14:49:00.000-06:00

In my poem Crumpets with the Queen, I have a line about waitng for for my OBE. The thing is that these Order(s) of the British Empire have come under scrutiny lately, most recently by the poet Benjamin Zephaniah featured in the link and in the poem CHRISTMAS HAS BEEN SHOT. I can understand his point. Hopefully you can too after reading the article and will appreciate my poem for the satire that it is. -w

Poetry in the news/more from our friends @ the ILP

2004-12-22T01:02:00.000-06:00

As part of my daily poetry regimine I track poetry news stories on the web. I like to keep current with trends and sometimes pass along the stories here so more people can be "in the loop."

Well, today's gleaning was a beauty:
http://www.deridderdailynews.com/articles/2004/12/21/news/news6.txt

It is a press release hot off the presses of the Beauregard Daily News. I will not name the person featured but the press release is to inform the good people of DeRidder, Louisiana that one of their own was selected to be featured in the International Library of Poetry's "International Who's Who of Poetry" anthology.

What's wrong with that? Nothing, nothing at all. I am pleased for the author's success but obviously this person did not research the reputation of the publisher. I have written previously about the vanity presses that prey on the naivete and egos of writers. I think it bears some repeating. A vanity publisher such as the International Library of Poetry will print anybody for a price.
Don't believe me, check out this site:
http://windpub.com/literary.scams/ilp.htm or for a laugh go here:
http://wockyjivvy.com/poetry/shame/index.html

ABC Television even did a 20/20 expose using the poems of second graders on the then National Library of Poetry http://windpub.com/literary.scams/abc-nlp.htm seems as though every kid in the class could be the next big thing...

Now, I am not saying that having a poem published isn't an accomplishment. It is. If, however, you are looking for more than an ego stroking - stay clear of the vanity publishers. From what I have read the going rate to see your poem in print is around $58.00
and that will put it in an anthology of 600 pages with six poems per page. That's 3600 poems! Talk about your coffee-table book.

Far better is the self publishing option. I just did a 18 page chapbook with over 30 poems and I didn't have to share a page with anybody. Total cost was less than what the ILOP charges for one anthology and I got thirty copies. Of course, there is only a saddle stitch (stapled) cover of cardstock (industry standard for a small press venture); not Corinthian leather boards or 24k gold leaf edges, but I like it.

And you know what? I'll do the same for you! That's right for a limited time I will professionally type-set and publish your very own chapbook of poems. Send me $50 + $10 shipping and handling and I will provide you with a great looking collection of entirely your own words. Why spend the "big bucks" when I can do it for you much more cost-effectively? You can even keep all the rights to your words.

Hmmm, maybe there is something to this afterall?

-w

Mission of Self destruction: Poetry in the news/The Japanese Times

2004-12-21T23:36:00.000-06:00

Gwenyth Paltrow as "Sylvia" Plath

By: KAORI SHOJI

Movie opens Christmas day in select markets

"A writer should be remembered for his writing," Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote, but in the world of movies many writers tend to be remembered for their personal lives and love affairs.

T. S. Eliot in "Tom and Viv" was a neurotic and cold man incapable of loving his wife/muse; Oscar Wilde in "Wilde" was tormented by his affection for a young and callous lord; and Iris Murdoch in "Iris" is shown either as a sexual free spirit reigning over the young dons at Oxford University, or as a befuddled, Alzheimer's-ridden old woman who couldn't string a sentence together.

In this sense, "Sylvia," a biopic of American poet and feminist icon Sylvia Plath, follows the movie-about-writers tradition, showing her to be at once beautiful, fashionable, despondent and despairing, but hardly ever portraying her engaged in what she is worshipped for -- her writing.

"Sylvia" splits her life rather brutally between marriage and self-destruction. The temptation to do so is understandable -- there was enough color and drama there to warrant an HBO mini-series.

Plath was married to dazzling '60s poet (and later British poet laureate) Ted Hughes. They had two children before the couple separated when Hughes embarked on an affair with a mutual friend. Shortly afterwards, Plath set out a tray of food and milk in her children's bedroom, sealed up their door, wrote a note to the babysitter and put her head in the gas oven. She was 31 years old. The film frustratingly omits the period between her husband's departure and her death, a time of feverish creative output when she wrote her best poems and an autobiography which Hughes later suppressed from publication.

Plath in "Sylvia" is insecure, lonely and full of sexual longing for her talented, roguish husband, but the woman who empowered herself through her poetry, who weaved lines of defiance and sardonic wit, is nowhere to be seen. It's little wonder that her daughter Frieda Hughes not only refused to cooperate with the filmmakers, but went as far as to publish a poem with the line "propping up Sylvia's suicide doll" to protest at how director Christine Jeffs and writer John Brownlow depicted her mother's life.

This significant omission aside, "Sylvia" is carefully crafted, stylishly atmospheric and perfectly tailored to suit Gwyneth Paltrow in the title role -- she and Plath even share an uncanny physical resemblance. This is Paltrow's best performance to date, and she seems to channel the inner demons that spurred Plath to prolific creativity in the face of betrayal, poverty and crushing solitude.

But in the movie the demons take center stage and Plath the poet recedes into the background. We see a passionate woman who alternated between tenderness and stormy fits of jealousy, who longs to write but spends most of her time pottering around the house or making dozens of cupcakes.

"You go for a walk and come back with an epic in hexameters. I sit down to write and wind up with a bake sale," she complains to her husband (excellently portrayed by Craig Daniels). The camera then cuts to Hughes, whose face is full of impatience and disappointment. He had wanted to share his life with a sexy and compelling poet rival and not this pretty similitude of a housewife (and we in the audience feel the same way).

But by all accounts Plath had never been anything but brilliant, if not always able to reveal her brilliance in the way she truly wished. She had grown up as an overachieving student in a liberal New England household and had gone to Oxford on a Fulbright scholarship. There she met and married Hughes, described in one of Plath's poems as always having "a love for the rack and the screw," and the pair set off on a six-year marriage that ended when he fell in love with Assia Wevill (Amira Casar), who had come to rent the couple's London flat with her husband and initiated a romance.

"Sylvia" implies that Wevill was by no means the first of Hughes's affairs, and by the time she came along Plath was already stuck in a rut of perpetual suspicion and misery. Whenever Hughes picked up the phone from a female editor Plath would fly into a tempestuous rage; highlighting her plight as a woman condemned to insecurity and obscurity while her husband grabbed the spotlight. "Sylvia" is careful not to accuse or judge Hughes outright, but implies in the very beginning that Plath had foreseen her fate when she first laid eyes on him: "Black marauder," she wrote, "you will be the death of me."

The Japan Times: Dec. 22, 2004

Crumpets with the Queen

2004-12-21T23:11:00.000-06:00

May I take your hat, sir?
That was the assumption.
Give me your hat!
That was the compunction.

The Will-to-Power:
Six pounds of shit in a five pound bag.

Yes
to the roaches
No
to the mantis
Yes
to the rat
No
to the locust
Yes
to the spider

climbing walls of deranged imagination
w/o any assumed compulsory provocation.

My will is a vacillating whore
waiting
at the door
with folded arms
and bare eyes
burning through

veils centuries thick
evil veils
devil veils.

The eyes of countless dead
birds and fish
never enough
heat to melt
the lock or
engrave the invitation.

Remember how you used to say
don’t forget me?
Remember insects under glass
at the Royal museum,
and liquid sentences
at the tips of my teeth?

I would sleep, imprisoned in smoke
green monsters with a thousand
legs, kicking, dancing
caught in a cage
screaming, crying

Yes!
No!
Behave now, behave!
A spoonful of medicine helps the sugar go down.

The telephone
London calling
Queenie wants
her slippers back

More fuzzy hammers
punching in – punching out
steam press past to present
assembly line lovers

neat rows
crisp lines
starched with magpie laughter
& 1930s switchboard silence / static.

Orchestrated to crescendo
I drown in sacred jello
drown in the sound of late blooming lilies;
disconnect Dali’s trans-Atlantic
telephone,
lean back play with my own mustache.

I plant a verb in Van Gogh’s ear
how could I otherwise? A noun would
never grow.

But how am I to float a mouth upon a mountain?
Best to wait for the dew to settle on the sea
cultivate a garden of crumpets
then invite her majesty over for high tea
and await my O.B.E.

There & Back another creation story

2004-12-21T01:49:00.000-06:00

I walked
for 6 days and
could not find
the edge of any-
thing.

Murder – dance – boots
desert air. Animal error.

My instinct thin
though judgment
seemed secure.

I walked
for 6 days all
and nothing known.

The 7th
I turned my heels
toward home only to

find myself
already there.

David P. Bates excerpted

2004-12-21T01:15:00.000-06:00

The words-on-the-paper are only dead trees and squid-piss. The poem’s canvas is the reader’s mind. Unlike the blank paper however, the reader’s mind is already cluttered, aesthetically or otherwise– and the poem will have to either be invited into a space big enough to accommodate it – contract and then expand if the space provided proves too small– or actually do battle: destroy or erase... without, of course, being tossed away by the reader before its task is complete. The notion that the reader comes to the poem and not visa versa – random poems do not walk the streets leaping into peoples minds– books do not stalk the reader and force their contents upon him/her. True that the reader must arrive at the poem and invite it in. HOWEVER it is the right of the poem to now wage a sort of warfare in the landscape of the reader’s mind. That a poem, invited as it is, must act as polite-guest in debt to the generosity of its host is absurd; such a notion is an intellectual pornography. Poetry is not the Muzak of literature– on the contrary– poetry is literature’s fiend-dog that gnaws the crotch and humps the leg– attacking to shreds anything from ordinary household objects, to small overly-curious children. To glom on, squeeze in, or blend seamlessly w/the muck of the reader’s mind is to have wasted the action or potential of poetic creation.
________________________++

I can't tell you a thing about this David P. Gates character other than he is a "small-press" "underground" poet who seems to have an on-going relationship with the editors of MY FAVORITE BULLET. His poetry is engaging and smacks of Bukowski influences which I for one will not hold against him. Here is one of his shorter pieces entitled telling her no as I button my jeans:

telling her no as i button my jeans

morning thumbs a ride thru the slats of the blinds
cruising the couch and its tangle of blankets
a bag of bottles is dragged to the curb
a city bus pisses its air brakes at the corner
a neighbor tugs at his lawnmower until it starts

I emerge from beneath her and make it to the toilet
five dixie-cups of water and a moment of silence
concentrating on the pulse in my erection

returning to the living room she is awake
putting her clothes on and pulling back her hair
if she smiles I'm going to smile back
if she says she loves me I'm going to say it too

she lights a cigarette
and asks if there's any coffee made

Its not probably what most would consider "good" poetry. Nonetheless, it seems representitive of much small-press poetry being written these days. All the usual suspects are here: the slice of life/confessional; the gratuitous nod to sex; the zinger at the end.

Is this what we have come to expect from our best-and-brightest underground poets? This over-worked and altogether familiar theme that has nearly become a cliche of itself through formulaic repetition is one of the reasons that I have taken haitus from editing and publishing my small-press endeavor. Granted, David P. Bates seems to handle the formula better than most and from what I have read of his words, more often than not, he says something that I have not heard before. At least not with as much pinache as he is able to muster.

His poetry is not for the "purists" amongst us but if you have any inclination to read what one of the bright spots on the bleak canvas of the small-press is doing here in the early 21st century, check this guy out: http://www.myfavoritebullet.com/PPbates.html

-w

Newswise

2004-12-21T00:06:00.000-06:00

Newswise: "Newswise An English professor is taking a new look at Geoffrey Chaucers often-neglected short poems, and suggests the writer intentionally broke some of the rules he is so well known for following.
English professor William Quinn will present his paper, Chaucer as the Father of Free Verse, during the Modern Language Association convention being held from Dec. 27-30 in Philadelphia.

Chaucer has traditionally been seen as the single poet who determined that, for the next four centuries, wed be counting syllables, Quinn said. My title suggests he broke the rules on purpose, and anticipated change.

The poet saw that there were problems with absolute regularity in such poetic forms as rhyming sequences and numbers of lines in a stanza, so he would try things, and if they didnt work, he would move away from them, according to Quinn.

For the conference he is studying Chaucers short poems, also known as lyrics. The short poems are not usually taught in literature classes, although they enjoyed a period of popularity back in their day. They are usually omitted altogether from anthologies of Chaucers work, and are tacked on at the end of the few that include them.

Quinn primarily looked at composite poems, in which Chaucer experimented with several different forms.
In his short poems, he would have nine-line stanzas, then hed have eight-line stanzas, and hed leave out things that shouldve been there, like refrains, Quinn said. You really get a strong sense of Chaucer experimenting with forms that are liberating rather than confining.

Most current research on Chaucer focuses on his ideas or themes, and includes political or gender readings, Quinn explained. By looking at the nuts and bolts of the poetry, and how Chaucer constructed his verse, he hopes to determine what"

For the oak supplying shade

2004-12-18T13:05:00.000-06:00

What of death or the slow crack of acorns?
Will the icicle melt with the spring,
Will the swallow find his way from Capistrano,
Will those quiet carillons once again sing?

Who will return the color to your eyes
or make of mortis any tone than white?

The lawn needs mown, you say
and the bed could be made,
why haven’t you walked the dog
these past four days? Oh, and
won’t I please take out the trash.

Peculiar is it not the small things that define
a life: the span of the bridge of a nose, small,
the distance between the moments when laughter
is caught before a tear;

The crack of an acorn – the birth of a tree
that in a scant stretch of years will be felled
and hewn and lacquered bright – fashioned
to supply a deeper shade, my coffin.

We had joy we had fun we had

2004-12-17T02:04:00.000-06:00

seasons in the sun, listen(ing) to the warm, alone, sold-out at Carnegie Hall. Moment to moment, the sea, the earth, in somebody's shadow, in lonesome cities, singing Stanyan Street carols of Christmas, we the beautiful strangers...here in Beatsville.

Yes. I am a self confessed fan of Rod McKuen! Are you surprised? Don't be, Mckuen is the most widely read poet of my generation. He sold over 9 million books of verse, recorded numerous musical scores - two of which were nominated for Academy awards. He has a wonderful website http://www.mckuen.com/ and will even answer his email questions (sometimes).

Sure, there are those who belittle his talent, those who call him "a joke" or are jealous of the "undeserved success" of his poetry, but ask yourself: 'Can all those accomplishments be totally without merit?' Do yourself a favor and dig out that old dog-eared copy of ALONE or LISTEN TO THE WARM and relive those memories. If you don't yet have copies of McKuen's work, walk down to the local Salvation Army or used book store and find yourself a discarded gem. Else visit his website and I almost guarantee if you give yourself half a chance, you too will become a fan.

___________________________++

Formula for a Rod McKuen Poem:
1. A nostalgic tone. (Spoken by a speaker in the Present.)
2. A lonely setting, emphasizing the separateness of the persona.
3. A male persona with female fantasies.(Usually the male is the victim of a relationship terminated.)
4. One contrived, pretty image.(Sensuous appreciation of remembrance)(Slang cuteness rather than appropriateness.)
5. Brevity.
6. In free verse. Not rhyme
7. Less than 20 lines, but 10 are better.

La Mer et Arbres

Driblets from leaves
fall into my cupped palms,
a crimson twilight
rises in your eyes.

I can never remember
what the sea sang to us
when we succumbed to her
ancient melody.

Endure with me until sunrise
and listen
to the forgotten songs of the sea-

Do you hear how they fall
like vesicles from the trees
upon our quiet ears?

-w

Of Dandelions and Sparrows

2004-12-16T01:31:00.000-06:00

I don't exist, neither do you, sorry to say.
neither does the dandelion that
I wove into your hair
one lost July morning long ago.
Only a fragment of air exists
in which forever soars constant;
our first glance at one another.

Every memory has been discovered a fraud
tragically etched in the lines of graveyard poets
except this one, that I vainly
try to carve into fire with a pumice blade.
I would place you in a suitcase of ashes
fly you with me around the world ---

I am a burnt out husk of bird
that has mistakenly lighted upon an electric fence.

I don't know whether the smell of your pillow
reveals the musk of some nearly forgotten dandelions.
I don't know whether your bed quilts
are tailored from charred wings of fallen sparrows.
I don't know whether your midnight alarm-clock
chirps back the words from my poems.
I don't know anymore if now down my cheek flows
a teardrop or a molting feather?

Poet Hamill to quit Copper Canyon Press, devote self to Poets Against the War

2004-12-15T22:40:00.000-06:00

2004-12-15
by NICK KOVESHNIKOV

PORT TOWNSEND -- Poet Sam Hamill is leaving Copper Canyon Press, the publishing company he founded 32 years ago, to focus on his organization, Poets Against the War.

The Port Townsend resident, who received global attention last year by openly challenging the Bush administration's involvement in the Iraq war through Poets Against the War, has been Copper Canyon Press' artistic director.

Fort Worden State Park-based Copper Canyon promotes aspiring and established poets.

Hamill, author of 14 volumes of poetry, says he is leaving his post for what he calls ``a cyberspace soap box for anti-war literary expression.''

Poets Against the War's Web site is at www.poetsagainstthewar.org .

"I've spent much of the past two years traveling and working for better understanding of poetry and social engagements, and there are now fellow organizations around the world,'' Hamill wrote in his resignation letter.

"Clearly, there is work to be done.''

Year's end

Hamill announced his resignation in a letter dated Nov. 20 and released Tuesday. His resignation takes place at year's end.

"Over the past 12 years, the press has taken its place as an eminent presence in the world of poetry,'' he says in the letter.

Hamill's letter didn't discuss the future of Copper Canyon Press now that the founder is departing, and others associated with Copper Canyon could not be reached late Tuesday for comment.

Poets Against the War grew from his idea to send anti-war poems to the White House in lieu of attending a poetry symposium to which he was invited by first lady Laura Bush.

The symposium was canceled in February 2003, the first lady saying it would be inappropriate to turn a literary forum into a political one.

The Iraq war started the next month.

http://www.baymoon.com/~ariadne/editorial/white.house.fears.poetry.htm

__________________________________**

The symposium titled "Poetry And The American Voice" was to include
discussion of the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and
Walt Whitman. No less than four US Poet Laureates declined to attend in protest to the Bush administration's handling of the planned war on Iraq. These notables included: Billy Collins, the sitting PL at the time, Richard Wilbur, Stanley Kunitz and Rita Dove.

During the past several months I have been involved with an online poetry community. The name is not important. What is of interest is the overwhelming amount of poetry being written and posted in support of the war. Most of which has some impassioned plea to the god of our side(sic)protecting American servicemen and values. Little to none is written about the autrocities committed or the banality of it all. My pacifism is not well received. And it seems to matter not that I, myself, am a veteran who served during the first Gulf War and through the invasion of Panama.

I fully respect the voice of the poets who are writing their war poem propoganda. I just wish that some of them would respect my dissenting verse and not be so quick to become a verbal terrorist.
We don't have to agree about the war but we should be able to agree that excercizing our right to think and speak and write what we do should not become yet another casualty in this debacle. There have been enough casualties already.

-w

Beneath the rule of men entirely great, the pen is mightier than the sword -Edward George Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873)

I spent the night reading Kerouac

2004-12-14T22:53:00.000-06:00

Jack Kerouac & Neal Cassady c.1948

everything belongs to me because I am poor
-Jack Kerouac

The hitchhiker, Sal
with his mongrel
on the make

rode the whole way
to Colorado saying
only five or six words.

One of which
I failed to hear.
“Neal” was the

mutt’s name.
We drove passionately
up the mountainside

using the moon
as our headlight.
Stars, campfires

tallied our ascent.
The hitcher
abandoned

us at a gas station
that was trying to
drown the darkness

with flood lamps.
He and his dog
up and vanished

like curling
Marlborro smoke
into nothing and night.

Dean and I rolled on
humming old John Denver
and Gordon Lightfoot.

Oddly, still openly
ill-at-ease, knowing
the sickle sweep

of tree limbs
grown heavy
with ice

on the road.
We could almost taste
the brandy waiting

on the other side
of the mountain.
I had five or six

words
for the world
that night

one of which
no one
heard.
_________________________+++

On the Road is my favorite novel to find "favorite lines" in. Just open to any page. It's at such a consistent intensity that important, quotable sentences typical of the book's overall tone are found wherever you turn.

You can also read the book this way, opening it at random and immersing yourself in whatever crazy adventures are at that point engulfing Sal Paradise (a stand-in for the author) and his bohemian buddies, especially that charismatic conman and wild-child Dean Moriarty (Kerouac's real-life friend Neal Cassady) but also including Carlo Marx (based on Allen Ginsberg) and Old Bull Lee (William S, Burroughs).

Not that their escapades are particularly exciting in any sense of suspenseful action. They usually involve getting stoned, talking themselves into a frenzy, raving over music, falling in lust, or simply getting high on life. In the big American cities. In rural backwaters. In Mexican whorehouses. En route between these places.

What makes it thrilling is the writing. It's like nothing you've read before. At least nothing written before 1957, before others got around to imitating Kerouac's apparently free-flowing style.

Much has been made of this inspired spontaneous-sounding prose. It's in-the-moment writing. It's jazz writing. It's automatic writing produced at top speed. A tour de force of unfettered genius. On the Road was created in three weeks of frenetic typing without pause for revisions, without punctuation, every word dropping right into its irremovable place....

That's the myth anyway.

Reasons I don't believe it are, first, On the Road is conventionally punctuated, even if many lines do run on very long in the most excitable parts. So it was certainly edited into sensible paragraphs and sentences at some point.

Second, On the Road is thought to have been written in 1951 and to have gone through several revisions as Kerouac looked for a publisher. When he finally found one in 1955, he had to cut it by a third. Apparently seven typescript versions of On the Road are known. I'd be very surprised if the final version looked very much like the first. Any good writer will re-write and reshape as he cuts. If the final version looks seamlessly spontaneous, I'm sure it took hours of sweat to achieve that effect.

Third, On the Road is just too well written to have emerged intact from Kerouac's drug and booze-fevered forehead. I've seen the kind of prose that wonderful writers produce while they're loosening up, when they're hammering out text without concern for structure or consistency. It's not pretty—not yet, not in that form. And it's certainly not sustained over pages. On the Road maintains its level over three-hundred pages. It's not all brilliant of course. Much of it is mundane—we drove here, we drove there, we slept, we woke up in a ditch. But it all makes sense. It's all of a whole. And enough of it is brilliant to make it inconceivable that it could have been produced without a lot of thought.

True, On the Road is famous for being unstructured. Kerouac purposely avoided literary conventions, attempting to create a new, more liberated kind of fiction. Yet, running through the novel are a few stories that do develop and reach climaxes of sorts. One of course is the rise and decline of Dean Moriarty. Another is the narrator Sal's search for love, acceptance and domestic bliss, conflicting with his attraction to the mania represented by Dean and the excitement of life on the road.

Another theme is the quest for enlightenment. This one is somewhat surprising. For quite a while you think it's kicks the boys are seeking. And for quite a while it may be. But gradually you realize their hunger runs deeper. Their love of jazz, their appreciation of outcasts they meet along the way, their romantic and sexual adventures, their stoned binges;they're too intense, too ecstatic. "Yes! yes!" Dean is always saying. Dean and Sal are continually enthusing over finding "It", which would be the perfect elusive, ephemeral moment, without past or future, when the seeker exists in the pure present. Finally it it strikes them in an odd kind of mystical experience in Mexico. A glimpse of nirvana perhaps, or just a distorted awareness from drugs, sex and lack of sleep? The moment is both a coming together and a sign of falling apart.

This is hard to explain without quoting a couple of pages in full. Nothing particular happens. No explicit insights are revealed. But the prose in the voice of Sal Paradise (an obviously appropriate name) carries the message in the way it's written. It's a triumph of style over logic, for it can be only be hinted at by form, never delineated by content.

And then the melancholy ending. The last chapter is again a masterpiece of evocation.Not an approach or a view that I favor, being of more critical mind. But I can appreciate the accomplishment and am moved by it even after half a dozen readings over the past 20 years.

Not everyone is. Many people read a hundred pages into On the Road and give it up. "It's the same thing over and over. Nothing ever happens. There's no character development. It's like listening to a drunk ramble on and on...."

I understand. And if that's your reaction, you may as well drop it. Just as many people will never get "ambient" or Indian raga music. I'm one of them. I'm aware that if I were to make a stronger sustained effort to understand them, I would probably learn to see the development, the kind of "what happens", that takes place in them. And be better off for it. Might even come to love it. But I only have so much time and I'd rather spend it on other more familiar music that I can get something out of right now.

Even if you don't get Kerouac's writing directly, in all likelihood you will eventually get it indirectly—through the works of later writers who took many of his innovations and used them in more conventional settings. Already, On the Road does not seem as bizarre as it did when it first became a cult hit in the 1950s.

Its mainstream reputation has been in and out of critical favor over the years, but I think On the Road may go down in literary history as one of two or three novels, including The Catcher in the Rye, that dramatically changed American writing for better or worse in the mid-twentieth century.

A year and a day

2004-12-14T02:30:00.000-06:00

ago Saddam Hussein was pulled out of his "spider-hole" and whisked off to some secret location. What has the former Iraqi ruler been doing since then? According to an AP news story released yesterday he has since "undergone a hernia operation, taken up gardening and written poetry that one visitor says is rubbish."

"Rubbish"or not at least Saddam has taken up a more
genteel way to pass his time than in days gone by. Poetry and gardening of all things! How civilized is that in describing a man who once was such a feared despot, terrorizing and killing his countrymen? Is this the same person we were told is the the capstone to the "axis of evil"? Seems like quite a contrast of personality to me. Then again, with G.W. taking over Saddam's former pursuits, what is an ex-tyrant to do?

While I am reasonably confident that I will never be able to read any of Hussein's poetry, I wish that I could. It couldn't be any worse than some I have read or written myself.

-w

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Advice to would-be poets

2004-12-14T01:41:00.000-06:00

# Invent a new language anyone can understand.

# Climb the Statue of Liberty.

# Reach for the unattainable.

# Kiss the mirror and write what you see and hear.

# Dance with wolves and count the stars, including the unseen.

# Be naive, innocent, non-cynical, as if you had just landed on earth (as indeed you have, as indeed we all have), astonished by what you have fallen upon.

# Write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure and has a low tolerance level for hot air.

# Write an endless poem about your life on earth or elsewhere.

# Read between the lines of human discourse.

# Avoid the provincial, go for the universal.

# Think subjectively, write objectively.

# Think long thoughts in short sentences.

# Don’t attend poetry workshops, but if you do, don’t go to learn "how to" but to learn "what" (What’s important to write about).

# Don’t bow down to critics who have not themselves written great masterpieces.

# Resist much, obey less.

# Secretly liberate any being you see in a cage.

# Write short poems in the voice of birds. Make your lyrics truly lyrical. Birdsong is not made by machines. Give your poem wings to fly to the treetops.

# The much-quoted dictum from William Carlos Williams,"No ideas but in things," is OK for prose, but it lays a dead hand on lyricism, since "things" are dead.

# Don’t contemplate your navel in poetry and think the rest of the world is going to think it’s important.

# Remember everything, forget nothing..

# Work on a frontier, if you can find one.

# Go to sea, or work near water, and paddle your own boat.

# Associate with thinking poets. They’re hard to find.

# Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. "First thought, best thought" may not make for the greatest poetry. First thought may be worst thought..

# What’s on your mind? What do you have in mind? Open your mouth and stop mumbling.

# Don't be so open-minded that your brains fall out.

# Question everything and everyone. Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo.

# Be a poet, not a huckster. Don’t cater, don’t pander, especially not to possible audiences, readers, editors, or publishers.

# Come out of your closet. It’s dark in there.

# Raise the blinds, throw open your shuttered windows, raise the roof, unscrew the locks from the doors, but don’t throw away the screws.

# Be committed to something outside yourself. Be militant about it. Or ecstatic.

# To be a poet at sixteen is to be sixteen, to be a poet at 40 is to be a poet. Be both.

# Wake up, the world’s on fire!

# Have a nice day.

Challenges To Young Poets[San Francisco Chronicle, February 18, 2001]

A trip to Northland Mall, Sterling, IL & WILDERNESS

2004-12-13T21:22:00.000-06:00

I wake bright and early at the crack of noon, prepare myself for the day; walk the dog, shower, etc.. I had sold some books on Amazon.com over the weekend so I got those ready for mailing.
The post office at 3pm on a Monday two weeks before Christmas is an adventure...but I digress.

My main objective for the day was to return the Billy Corgan book of "poetry"
BLINKING WITH FISTS to the Walden Books store at Northland Mall in Sterling IL.
and to excerices my sock-footed-scream (see below things to do this week). I had made sure late last night to place the receipt for the book safely inside the front cover so as not to forget about it. Well and good. I arrive at the book store, gently remove the poetry book from my attache and tell the clerk that "I am here to return this". She asks if "I have the receipt?" To which I reply, "Yes, right here...ah here...here??" Somehow between last night/early this morning and my arrival at the Walden's it mysteriously vanished. The clerk was kind enough. She informed me that I had a month from the date of purchase to find the receipt for a cash refund. Otherwise, an instore exchange would be the best offer. I thanked her. I then went to look again over the selection of poetry featured on the shelves. Three titles caught my eye: Robert Frost, Lord Byron, and W.B. Yeats, all three could be mine for the price of my one copy of the Corgan book. No, I thought to myself, I came here to get my money back! I can get those later if the receipt remains unfound. I left the store crestfallen but still willing to complete the second part of my mission.

The mall was moderately busy with pre-Christmas shoppers, Santa was having his picture taken with children in one cordened off area, and no security guards were to be seen. "Excellent" I thought. I removed my loafers and felt the cold floor through the soles of my socks. Adjusting for the temperature difference I put the shoes into my attache, and began running to gather the speed neccessary for a good slide on the marble. I had to pick the exact moment to apply the "breaks" so as not to bowl over or crash into other pedestrians. I found the right place and opened my mouth with the only word that came to mind worthy of screaming --"YAWP!!!"
For some reason, "YAWP" came to mind, probably due to the Walt Whitman line, I sound my barbaric Yawp over the rooftops of the world. -Song of Myself. The funny thing was that nobody really paid me much attention. Sure a couple quizzical glances but nothing more. Perhaps my fellow mall-goers were too into their own missions? Maybe nothing really is shocking anymore? Maybe madmen are common? Whatever the reason(s) at least I accomplished half of the reasons I went to Northland Mall today. And while the experience may not have been anymore poetic than Billy Corgan's BLINKING WITH FISTS it made me feel alive. Life and good poetry should do that. Next trip, I am getting the Frost and Byron and Yeats. -w.

Wilderness

the world is full of mysteries
a lawyer could be a bum
a bum a lawyer
a politician killing truth
a soldier the father one never had
a lover a son or a master or an usurping servant
the moon a crust of cheese
a tale a trap
a person a ghost
a ghost someone
a flower a symbol
the truth a dogmatic lie
a priest/nun a devil drunk with lust
the drawing of a dog/cat a companion
a candle the absence of light
perfume the smell of ruin
cracks openings to the future
a memory the weight of the past
a wall the emergence of hope
a stone a poem untold
the recitation of drops of water
Morrison’s songs and a smile of his
a serpent reaching straight down to the guts
the aerodynamic displacement of a speeding car
a shiver on your right shoulder
the rumbling engine of a truck
a blind tunnel and dust
& giggling laughter the love of brothers
a trip a stay
a stay a journey
a home a prison
a circle an amulet
a frog a sequence
a movie without screen
a blue cushioned chair
triggered in the dark
a game of death
reviving passion killing pleasure
a denial the approval
ways and ways
unsettled ways
in the wilderness of our well planned day

Things to do this week

2004-12-13T01:49:00.000-06:00

1. Learn to yodel

2. Throw an old work-boot from the cab of my F-150 into a local cornfield; try to find it Friday

3. Turn my socks inside out, run screaming through a mall sliding on the marble floor (while returning my copy of BLINKING WITH FISTS)

4. Send a copy of the Anarchist's Cookbook to a friend at the FBI

5. Find a flower that has died and transplant it to an indoor pot of earth, record the results

6. Write a poem that someone other than I likes enough to nominate for a Pushcart Prize

7. Call the IRS and wish the agent in charge
"Happy Holidays"

CENSORSHIP IN AMERICA NOT ONE WRITER RAISES HIS VOICE AGAINST IT * By Jack Micheline

2004-12-13T00:25:00.000-06:00

When I began to write in the early fifties my work was full of anger and raw energy. I roamed America like a mad dog, going from cause to cause and group to group never finding the answer outside of myself my very being. I ended up in a twelve dollar fifty cent cold-water flat on Cornelia St. in the village. Only after I probed honestly inward did I start tapping in on the clarity of my voice and vision. By some lucky accident my first book of poems was published, River of Red wine , with an introduction by Jack Kerouac. I was launched on a Rocket ship called hope into a literary jungle loaded with shit, far worse than the garment center where I pushed a hand truck years before; nonetheless I began to discover myself-- the process of being my own man had begun.

It was a time when Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Bill Burroughs were influencing young writers. A time of great energy in New York and San Francisco, out of the Slime pits of America new voices were emerging in all the arts. Poetry, Painting, jazz, Dance, Theater; many books will be published about that period. Hundreds of new voices were to be discovered, a time of revolt and breaking down of old values. McCarthy was gone and John Kennedy was making his rise to the Presidency of the United States. A time of hope. Almost every night there was a poetry reading in the eastside or Village. Books previously banned were sold in drug stores. A market place was being built for contemporary arts. The mass media absorbed the rebellion into the system, like a hungry octopus.

America didn't get any better it got worse. The business of America was business and would remain that way. Man would remain in the soup forever, "The best minds of our generation were (still being) destroyed by madness." The hope of the fifties became the nightmare of the Seventies. The Beats were transformed into the punks of the Eighties, Henry Miller fought his lone courageous battle and won, and Kerouac's dream, The Great American dream, bloated with beer and bitterness and tragedy, dying in front of a TV set, the way of true genius. Kline's great heart wasn't enough, going out before his time.

Nothing changed or will ever change. The Literary revolution was a put up job. A middle-class revolution, a paper tiger, a media hype at best. Mankind shoveled and controlled like a yo-yo. The masses well dressed and ignorant forever. A Promise, a dream blown up in smoke and gone to the winds of time. That man should believe in brotherhood and love, Whorehouses and park benches became the refuge of saints. The dollar bill emerged as king-rat. Nothing emerged from the mass protest but the enrichment of those controlling it. We who believed were passed over like a bad penny, an incurable disease, but I lived the dream and survived, desiring to become the most dangerous man in America, because I took the lonely solo path of a tortured saint. A martyr using my mind and body to experiment on life--to find a new way. The way of Self Liberation.

Everyday thousands of young people get murdered and no one says a word. Murdered by mind control. If I liberate myself I liberate mankind, I seek Brotherhood, love, kindness and worship the light and the sun. Now is the time for the emergence of new voices. The poor white voices not heard from, hidden in the dark corners of America. The voices crushed on the skid rows, and beaten on the bottom of cities. Those drunk on dreamers wine, singing in the bars and reading in the coffee houses, walking in the streets and highways of America out of their minds. Beaten up in drunk tanks and sent to mad houses and thrown into the dung heaps of time. Singing on the lone prairie with dogs and children. Climbing the lone mountain talking to God.

We who love life must affirm life. It is not too late, the way of Brotherhood and Sisterhood together and self liberation. This is a book about a way to be one-self with God and truth. To love and be true to oneself. To gain self knowledge. To be one with the world. One World. A lone attempt to be one with God and self, the search for love and brotherhood. A book I lived and believe in. The Unbelievable Belief. Read these poems and songs outloud. On skid row. Read it in the flop houses, and drunk tanks and mad houses. Read it on the buses, in cars on highways. Read it in the churches and schools. Read it to your parents, to the judges and politicians. Read it alone laughing and looking at the sky. Read it till you're blue in the face. Find out who you are. Fight Back!!

* (It is believed that the book referred to in the last paragraph is OUTLAW OF THE LOWEST PLANET by Jack Micheline.)

2004-12-12T21:43:00.000-06:00

W.B. Yeats' 86-year-old The Second Coming seems all too prophetic when the later emergence of communism, Nazism and fascism is considered, says Ken Johnston, chairman of the IUB Department of English, who teaches about literature, film and music that depicts the end of the world.

Yeats' poem also is interesting in light of millenarianism, a belief system that teaches that Christ is about to return to preside over the "thousand years of peace" that, according to Revelations, will precede Armageddon. The poem was written in 1919 the period of World War I and the Russian Revolution and depicted a different version of the second coming.

"Rather than creating a picture of the second coming of a loving and kind Jesus, Yeats expands his horizons and imagines the second coming of an anti-Christ," Johnston said. Yeats describes a mixture of Sphinx and bestiality "slouching toward Bethlehem to be born."

This "rough beast," Johnston added, is usually interpreted as the totalitarian movements of the 20th century. He said that Western civilization is captivated by interpretations of the end of the world, whether it is a literary spin on the subject, such as H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds, or a musical one, such as R.E.M.'s It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine).
However, Johnston said, it takes true talent to turn the end of the world into something creative and new. "Some writers (like Yeats) have created interesting and significant ideas out of these dreadful scenarios rather than just retelling horror stories. In fact, the idea of the end of the world is so overwhelming that it takes a very good artist to do anything good and significant with it." And I am not implying that I have with
Winter Unpacking.

As my anonymous commentor wrote "Well, it certainly is ballsy to invoke Slouching Toward Bethlehem with nary a mention of its author."

Hope this is a sufficient nod. I had thought the allusion would stand up well enough on its own. But thanks for the nudge.

-w

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yeats

Winter Upacking

2004-12-12T08:05:00.000-06:00

Winter all blue and white and gray;
grandpa’s stew and grandma’s quilts,
the smell of Vicks and bourbon straight
rising to fill a cup of tea.
Narrow light; shadows are dark crucifixes
on snow; mirrors signaling angels and fire.
Slouching toward Bethlehem
(Almighty House of Bread);
the Virgin birth and pine trees adorned
like bridesmaids all aglow—
There is a sadness creeping through
cinder and ice and salt and it waits
long into March or April or May,
seeking the hollow place of skulls.
All blue and white and gray.

*

Red is incarnation and blood,
the scent of smoke, the crunch
of boot heels on innocent bone—
Prisons, hospitals and morgues.
Final destinations; granite gardens
where none can hear
where none can taste
where none has seen
what beauty lurks six feet under rage.
Red is war and passion all
hot and dead and timeless awaiting pardon.

*

I drink redemption from a wine glass
and suck salvation from the skull of
another reenacted Calvary. Prefer this
feast of friends to a carnival of stone.
Night into day. Day into night and
nothing ever ends or begins the way
I think it should;
well ordered and unafraid.
Come now, you wouldn’t have it any
other way—
Kicking at quilts that never
keep feet warm enough to dream or sleep.
Step softly another winter is unpacking
all blue and white and gray.

Free Verse...Free Form

2004-12-12T07:01:00.000-06:00

Free Verse...Free Form:

The nice thing abour free verse is that there are no boundaries, rules, or expected patterns. So, one could take any story, separate the lines, and have a poem of free verse. The rise of free verse made the line-break a more flexible device without obligation. Numerous experimenters explored the potential of layout. Some poets used ragged-left as well as ragged-right formats which added to the author's creativity. You'll find that free verse poets use the visual as the more formal device in their writing.

Use these sites to learn the form of free verse and then expand your writing and creativity. Once you've developed your writing samples, post them to a web page...perhaps your own!!!

The Internet Resources

A Lesson for Free Verse - Lesson 24 from other lessons in a poetry unit. This lesson models 'free verse' and then offers some student activities to support that learning.

The UVic Writer’s Guide - The department of English at the University of Victoria displays a short study of free verse.

Free Verse: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics - A journal that offers examples and a submission section.

Free Verse: University of Pennsylvania - A nice explanation of free verse to use in a lesson for understanding and writing.

EdHelper - A very nice 'worksheet' to analyse free verse for understanding.

Forms of Poetry: Free Verse - A few examples from great Poets.

Wikipedia: Free Verse - A free encyclopedia with a definition of free verse.

Poetry…Pattern and Variation - As always, dependable, the Purdue Online Writing Lab offers several lessons in poetry and free verse.

Modern American Poetry - A critique of major American writers...Williams, Stevens, and Eliot...free verse and their approach.

Creative Writing: Free Verse Poetry - A beginner's guide to writing poetry...includes free verse.

Solstice in December

2004-12-12T06:37:00.000-06:00

As the sun closes in on Capricorn
while trees stand naked forthright to the wind
after the grizzlies succumb to slumber
after the bees curl fetal their thousand eyes all closed

after the clouds have draped shrouds across the sky
and the days have slipped from green past gray
the leaves gathered into mounds on the iron ground
the mounds burn rotten fire
their smoke sticking in that deep-throated-sky

after the last dark roses have been safely tucked away
and the vegetables laid to rest in root cellar tombs
and the thousand whispers of your voice are carried into rain

when the vanishing point of southbound geese
stretch trails deep across a hammered brow
when afterthought is frosting over pools of reminiscence
then the hours will begin to quietly snow.

Percy Bysshe Shelley | "A Defence Of Poetry" | poetry articles | plagiarist.com

2004-12-11T23:12:00.000-06:00

Percy Bysshe Shelley | "A Defence Of Poetry" | poetry articles | plagiarist.com:
"A Defence of Poetry: An Essay

According to one mode of regarding those two classes of mental action, which are called reason and imagination, the former may be considered as mind contemplating the relations borne by one thought to another, however produced, and the latter, as mind acting upon those thoughts so as to color them with its own light, and composing from them, as from elements, other thoughts, each containing within itself the principle of its own integrity. The one is the ro noielv, or the principle of synthesis, and has for its objects those forms which are common to universal nature and existence itself; the other is the ro xoyiselv, or principle of analysis, and its action regards the relations of things simply as relations; considering thoughts, not in their integral unity, but as the algebraical representations which conduct to certain general results. Reason is the enumeration of qualities already known; imagination is the perception of the value of those qualities, both separately and as a whole. Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things. Reason is to imagination as the instrument to the agent, as the body to the spirit, as the shadow to the substance. "...

here, Bullet, here

2004-12-11T22:34:00.000-06:00

If a body is what you crave,
then here is gristle, bone, and flesh.
Here is the clavicle – snapped wish,
the heart's open chamber, the leap
thought makes across the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you need,
that inexcusable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you have started. Here, Bullet, here
is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s soft esophagus, silencing my
tongue’s expletitives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet, here
is where the world ends, in the blanket
surrender of love.

Improving the craft & A review of 'Blinking with Fists'

2004-12-11T18:28:00.000-06:00

Today began like most others for me; waking, taking the dog for a walk, checking the mail. The thrill of looking inside my mailbox still capivates me like a child who expectantly awaits the "proof of purchase" prize from some cereal company. Today, it was the arrival of my Amazon.com purchase of The Design of Poetry An intelligent, concise guide to the understanding and appreciation of poetry by: Charles B.Wheeler.

The book was ordered upon the recommendation of Professor Michael Bennett, who thoughtfully suggested that I use it to improve my
"drivel" passing as poetry. Kudos professor. The book is certainly worthwhile reading for those of us who strive to better our writing skills. The major bases of "What is Poetry", "The Qualities of Poetry", "The Poem as Design", along with chapters dedicated to explaining such devices as: Allegory, Irony, Metaphor, Meter, Symbolism, and Traditional Forms are all covered. There are physical illustrations of the author's points, along with illustrations taken from classic poets and poems, written out so as to make sense of the grand objective; the understanding and appreciation of poetry. I look forward to implementing Wheeler's lessons and recommend the book (what I have read so far) to you as well.

__+++___

As I have written, my poetic influences have been mainly drawn from the songwriters of my time; the small-press authors, the generally "common" folk who write from the heart and not as a profession. This stated, I was anticipating a read of Billy Corgan's first book of poems entitled "BLINKING WITH FISTS". Mr. Corgan was lead singer and lyricist for the Smashing Pumpkins, a group that I truly enjoyed during the 1990s. Corgan's lyrics were intelligent and sharp, they made me think. I was hoping his poetry would do the same. I was dissappointed.

He doesn't say anything that hasn't been said a thousand times before and in a way more poignant by virtue of their being done first. He whines, he pleads, he plays the "tortured poet" made all the more unbelievable do to his super-star status and probable bank account. I am not saying that he hasn't suffered. We all do. Its just difficult for me to put any credibilty to his words:

I taste, relate, to invade you
No wait, I'll change, and await you
So cry no tears of missing out
Cry for those who go without

Are we to believe that Mr Corgan is one who goes without? Seems highly unlikely except in some metaphyical sense. Yes, I am a fan of his music and songs. Siamese Dream was a seminal recording in my life. I only wish that this collection of writing could have approached the lyric and psychological qualities of that album. Regrettably, it is little more than a souvinier, a curiosity, a blip. Still, BLINKING WITH FISTS gives me hope. Hope b/c I know that I write poetry every bit as well as Billy Corgan. It should give you hope too for the same reason.

Now all we need is fame and maybe our first book of verse could be on the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction; 3 weeks number 1?

Sorry Billy, I wanted to like your book, I really did! Thankfully I kept the receipt. It goes back to Walden Books on Monday.

A day in the life 12/10/04

2004-12-10T18:42:00.000-06:00

No sleep last night. I spent it finishing up
An Axe For The Frozen Sea, my sixth chapbook. This is the first one that I did all the writing, layout, and published myself. Okay, I took the ms to a local copy shop for an initial press run and saddle stitching; the rest was/is mine.

I am rather proud of it. In the way that one is proud of one's own labor. Since it is under my own imprint, I wanted it to look as good as possible. Hopefully 'The Copy Shop' does the layout justice. As for content it is about abuse (mental, physical, sexual) and domestic violence. Interspersed are some lighter pieces,along with the ever elusive love poem; used mainly as counter-point to the heavy stuff. Here are three examples:

So much for happy endings

There is no end-all
be-all remedy for fear.
Saying the monsters
are only in my head
doesn’t make them
less real or easier
to tame. No matter

how many gestalt
sessions burn my
bones across the
psychiatrist couch;
no one wants to hear
the bad feeling. Not

that there is One only,
legion – many

thoughts

feelings

actions

pushing and shoving
like angry children
in a sandbox war. You

can count on me
but you may never know
how things never change
until something snaps. It

is an altogether fearful step
from the ledge expecting now
to lock into forever. It is done,

finished. Enough to know
that nothing is all that is and
saying so doesn’t make this go away
or the ending any better.

Why Women go to the restroom in Groups

So, I’m sitting at a quaint, yet
overly-priced Italian restaurant
at a booth flooded with a red
wine-colored table cloth
jonesing to be drunk.
Next to me, a table full of
men heckling like soccer moms
after a controversial PTA meeting.

And amongst them I faintly overhear a question posed by one who is smaller framed than the rest.
A question that has remained somewhat of a
mystery to most men I suppose for quite some time

with marina sauce hanging
from the corner of his mouth,
and a newly streaked garlic
smear across the right side of his
corporate white sparkling collared shirt,
he manages to mumble despite
many apparent glasses of table wine,

“So why is it that broads always
gottagotada restroom in groups?”

Several theories were offered,
from the I-gotta-powder-my-nose facade
to an eventual tale of convoluted sexual escapades,
that even the cheesiest of the
adult film directors wouldn’t concoct,
and it was then that I decided to let
the boys in on a little known truth,

I got it straight from my former wife.
Slowly I walked to their table when a clumsy
hush of voices greeted my arrival,

“Fellas, so you wanna know why women go to the restroom in groups?
Well, it’s the toilet monster.
He’s big and green, and he’ll bite them
in the ass when they’re not looking.
But like most men, he’s scared of
women in large groups.

An Axe For The Frozen Sea Between Us

I love the way your back perfectly arches as you slip into a pool; how when you emerge droplets of chlorine kiss your copper smooth skin. I wish that I could be that drop of water above your lips and just for a moment be a part of you before your hand wipes me away.

I love how when I look into your sea blue eyes
it feels like glaciers are crushing my lungs. I can't breathe. For a split-second I was an upside down image inside your mind; drowning this way sets my brain on fire.

I love your scent and savor it when you leave your shirt behind. The way it mixes perfectly with me and sun block; the summers we ate watermelon on the front porch, spitting seeds, running barefoot through sprinklers in the grass; nearly naked and every inch wet are among the few of my favorite things.

I love how without realizing it, every poem I write somehow is about you; the way you call out my middle name making love and can tell me why when I close my eyes and tip my head back laughing I feel alive like an executioner just before the kill.

+++

This collection has been a very long time in the making. It is time that they see some light. Ten per cent of the proceeds are going to a local charity that works with people suffering from
abuse(s) and those who are healing.

There is autobiography in all of them, but all the details may not be exact. My previous published works have been called, "post-beat-confessional". Not sure what that means beyond that they were done after the beat and confessional movements had their haydays. Maybe that is an euphemism for lacks structure, craft, or anything that makes for good poetry...?

I know who my poetic influences were/are and most don't include rhyme or pre-2o th. century authors. Most are song-writers, experimentalists, and beat poets. One is a professor at a community college in Michigan. Two are independent publishers of poetry. The balance are the poets I have met through poetry slams and running EARSPANK. Needless to say, academics are underrepresented in my raisonne of influences. I am sure that this will be evident in the upcoming reviews. *Dr. J. Evans Pritchard be hanged *note this was the contrived name for the author for the poetry textbook that got "ripped" in the opening moments of Dead Poet's Society.

As any person who takes poetry seriously, I want to write it well. I try to learn something new about the craft every day. It's becoming easier to recognize greatness in poetry. Great poetry makes your heart sing, and your brain itch; it makes you want to punch someone in the face, and make sweet love with someone; it fills your soul with the rapture of deep sadness, and the mirth of true fear; it makes your toes roll, and your eyes tap; it reaches out a great strong, hairy, calloused hand, grabs you hard by the scruff of the neck and gives you a violent hugging; it gives you a warm shiver; it gives you the feeling that you just walked over someone else's grave; it makes you feel as if you're watching someone; it makes the hairs on the back of your neck lie down; it makes you alone in a crowd, thronged in a phone booth; it makes you feel as if everyone everywhere understands you perfectly all the time. I don't know what you like, but I know you know great poetry when it sees you.

If you would like to get a copy of Axe For The Frozen Sea write (email) and let me know. May honest words be yours; soft and sweet for you never can tell when you may have to eat them -w

Wave

2004-12-09T01:04:00.000-06:00

Over the refuse of dizzy millions
Over the television our spies assure us is dead

Over the blinking sixes of a damned rhododendron
Over the icy rain of inexcusable conception

Over the death knell played upon a trouser fly
Over the time machine gasping for breath

Over the coma mind hanging above my fireplace
Over the hypodermic gone twenty-three hours thin

Over panty-hose and paint
Over the sea as a cheap final act

Over emergency rooms filled with saline skeletons
Over a clip-board admissions ‘X’ marks the spot

Over the maggot white flamingo beached on the grass
Over the immoral bargains sold as Super-Sized love

Over the stagger of vertical black-outs
Over an ever smaller denominator

Over “a water buffalo smile dashed on the ocean’s knee”
Over the whole menagerie of iron-clad lingerie

Over an old friend of the family’s overnight stay
Over young cherry trees secured against a liar’s axe

Over the inky rust of pulled meat confused and assertively
so Over untrue cabanas late night sexcapades

Over lightning splitting life’s inaudible scream
Over the crypt lining a vagina with paste

Over self-reproducing robots firing seminal mercury
Over somnambulism accidentally murdering Plato’s cave

Over a long sentence equal to three short rifle bursts
Over the probability that black holes are stars in reverse

Over a plum line of any length barely taut
Over a veranda with a vegetable garden garnish view

brave Ophelia, wave!

Whitman, South America and Nascar

2004-12-08T15:16:00.000-06:00

The following is from http://www.collagepoetchicago.blogspot.com/

Whitman, South America and Nascar In the December issue of Chicagopostmodernpoetry.com, the website that I edit with my wife Waltraud Haas we are profiling 7 Brazilian poets. One of the poets to be profiled is Regis Bonvicino- a magisterial poet- who I was first introduced to by Charles Bernstein in 1999. Regis is a poet in the way that French, Italian, Spanish and Latin American poets are poet- he is a public figure. Regis is a poet who matters in his nation.

I do not want to reveal his answers to the interview but one of the things that challenged me is the fact that he said and I am quoting in translation that many American poets view Politics and Public life and Poetry as separate things and that many poets in the USA view Political Poetry as something for the Developing World. I then had an experience on my own where a Chapbook of mine was rejected because it was 'too political'. Not that the poetry was not good- the editor liked it- but that it was too political I do not know what that means would Whitman be too personal?Neruda too romantic?

Latin American poets, Neruda, Drummond de Andrade, Vallejo, Cardinal, and many more have always been political. Art and Politics are not seen as separate things. Unfortunately here in the USA we do not take life as a whole- we are "Feminist poets" "Working Class Poets" "Experimental Poets" and in the end we continue as poets to talk to ourselves, alone. I think that poets need to stand for Freedom. Our verse is not quoted by the average person and we are marginalized and ignored while billions is spent to promote Monday Night Football and Desparate Housewives. Poets should answer the lies.

If you go back to America's seminal poet Whitman, he wrote confessional verse, but he also wrote about the world as it was and he made a political statement by what he wrote. Alan Ginsberg did the same thing with Moloch, But this has not been normal in the USA. The most important Americans of the Modernist Period (1906-1945), were not overtly political in the way say a Neruda or Lorca were. Yes Pound was a Rightist, but he was not actively writing poetry for that reason, he did write some essays however, Williams and Stevens were not political. Eliot made a political statement with the Wasteland, and then proceeded through the rest of his life to become more conservative and almost repudiate his Avant Garde Credentials.

I do not think that we as Poets should be overtly Political but as poets we possess insights into Politics and Language that are disarming- especially to those who wish to silence us. I just finished reading a new translation of Akhmatova, fabulously put out by Yale University Press translated by Nancy Anderson and here we have a woman who is a Conservative, Christian and Traditional and Avant Garde at the same time. I only wish I read Russian to hear these words

"There was no one who smiled in those days
Except the Dead who Found Peace at Last"
A Akhmatova- Requiem

The issue here is not Red and Blue states. The issue is whether those who are Poets will offer an alternative to the vulgar world in which we now dwell. All is commodified, all is for sale. Wal Mart gives us lower prices- American Factories close because of Wal Mart's low prices and then50 year olds are out on the street is that the America we want?

I do not fault the Evangelicals for believing in what they do- I am a Christian as well- but what I fault is the fact that we have become a nation of screamers. The fact that we are not interested in working for the Common Good- only for our own good. Petty political games and nastiness are the norm for our nation. I think that it is evil that politicans use people's sexual orientation to divide people, it is evil that people who want to reduce the amount of Abortions cannot sit down both sides and say"Lets work on this" lets try to make this situation ok? A president who uses Dred Scott to send 'messages'to his base; Frederick Douglass must have turned over in his grave.We are one nation-Indivisable- at least we were.

I feel like America has become the set of the Godfather. Like a Mafia family winners win, losers die and no one questions anything. In the end I grieve not because my candidate lost the White House, I grieve because we as a culture are in decline. China and Asia in general are advancing; they will overtake us economically soon- and unlike past declining Empires like France, Russia and Britain we have demeaned our national culture- we need to create that culture and begin toanswer what we are as a people in our own enviable poetry. I dont think anywhere else is better- Europe has big problems- they more selfish than we are and less vibrant, when was the last time a British poet or Painter tore up the world? But I want so much for the US to live up to its creed.

" I celebrate myself.
And what I assume you shall assume,
Every atom belonging to me as good belongsto you"...
I stand on this spot with my soul"
-Walt Whitman

Howard Zinn came out with a new collection of principal sources for his People's History of the United States. In this book he includes the speech to the Jury by Vanzetti. He challenges the court and says that he is on trial for being a "radical and an Italian" racism; yes in 1922 Italians were not White and are not now White- and hatred of Radical politics were on trial and both lost.You read some of these people and I am just ashamed of myself- I should be doing more.

It has become time for Poets, Artists, and Writers to begin a Greek Choir to the world in which we live. A world where Middle Class people have less and less, a world where narrow provincalism is damaging our nation and removing our sense of optimism. A world where we are in reverse- Civil Rights, Evolution, Art and Culture are challenged for no good reason than the fact that it makes people uncomfortable- I yearn for the voices of dissenters smashing icons and ignoring feelings of the those who have not opened their minds.

I yearn for poets whose opinions and writings land them in jail not in small lit mags unread. It is our job to stand among the wreckage and yell STOP to the world in which we are now entering.

I yearn for a nation that is aware that more than being the nation of Bill Gates, JP Morgan and Henry Ford we are the Nation of Whitman, Dickinson, Stein, Vanzetti, Jackie Robinson, Dorothy Day, Jane Addams, and many others. The question is not Blue and Red states the question is for me are we the nation only of the Dow Jones, NASCAR, Suburban Sprawl and vulgar selfinterest or the Declaration of Independence and Leaves of Grass?

Still Small Voice

2004-12-08T04:55:00.000-06:00

When the stars are occluded
and the night is made of a different
insatiable living tissue, the waxy tube
plunges inextricably to the soul.

The poet undoes himself in a planned act of
forgetting. His movements extend themselves
like leaves of grass in a dark rolling yard.
Where no one has seen, who has seen?

Voices are softly colliding in an ink-wash
of indistinct beeps all around the fragile scene.
This eustachian world is what has remained
important in all the sad tumult of entropy.

No more than this darkness will ever
survive the last treacherous path. As if
in a dream, we become aware of another and another
and another aural departure; the great symphony dying slow.

Poetry Police at it again,or How I quit loving language and learned to hate the First Amendment

2004-12-08T03:15:00.000-06:00

The Bush Adminstration has given a stern warning to American publishers. Publishers will face grave legal consequences if they edit poetry from Iran (as well as Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other nations with which trade is banned) on the grounds that such editing amounts to "trading with the enemy." Laws and regulations prohibiting trade with various nations generally apply to items like oil, wheat, nuclear reactors and even tourism, but according to the Bush Administration these laws also apply to grammar, spelling and punctuation.

According to a recent advisory letter from the Treasury Department, Americans who publish poetry or prose from a country under a trade embargo are forbidden to do the following: reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, replace "inappropriate words," or add illustrations. Several major publishers, editors and translators were recently informed that, from now on, only publication of "camera-ready copies of manuscripts" would be allowed. For example, correcting typographical errors (in a poem submitted by an artist living in Iran) is punishable by a fine of up to $500,000 and 10 years in jail.

A Treasury Department spokeswoman, Tara Bradshaw, explains that banned activities also include "collaboration on and editing of the manuscripts, the selection of reviewers, and facilitation of a review resulting in substantive enhancements or alterations to the manuscripts." From now on, publishers will need to get "U.S. government permission" to publish and edit the work of poets who live in countries with "oppressive regimes."

Although publishers may seek a license from the government that would allow for some editing, First Amendment specialists are outraged, calling the new rules "censorship" and "a prior restraint." In a recent New York Times article, Nahid Mozaffari, an editor specializing in literature from Iran, calls the implications staggering: "A story, a poem, an article . . . or any other area of knowledge cannot be translated, and even if submitted in English, cannot be edited in the U.S. This means that the publication of the PEN Anthology of Contemporary Persian Literature that I have been editing for the last three years would constitute aiding and abetting the enemy." The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control does not dispute Mozaffari's assessment of the situation.

According to a letter the office sent in September, "Such activity would constitute the provision of prohibited services to Iran." Since 1988, Congress has prohibited the executive branch from interfering "directly or indirectly" with the trade of literature or informational materials. This exception regarding trade embargos, known as the Berman Amendment, was first sponsored by Representative Howard L. Berman (D). Referring to what he calls the Bush Administration's "very bizarre" interpretation of the amendment (that literature may be published but not edited), Berman says, "It is directly contrary to the amendment and to the intent of the amendment." Although there has been no prosecution yet for "criminal editing," the mere fact that the rules exist have scared some publishers into rejecting works from Iran and other countries.

Train-spotting

2004-12-07T04:40:00.000-06:00

A train station in the ancient city,
scene of a hundred possible suicides,
the shunted iron tracks stop just

a little beyond the set
in verdant surroundings.
Easy contest: the train

in and out of the station
heaving pistons, undressing
in smoke, blunt dance

of dirty-nosed kids, avuncular conductor
in shiny uniform, raises his pocket watch;
a parody of all his works. And frequently,

the universal moment of the engine
with its godlike whistle, the lunge back
before forward, cut to the face

on the platform, cut to the face in the
Pullman window. The sum of the scene,
the twinning with the opposite carriage

that everyone knows. And then no more
but the sound of a sudden shower
on the roof and on the parapet, carried

to the platform part tin part
thunder, played out as a flood
on the tracks, with dissolving paper

in gathering steam. The heat stench
as a solid column of air. Waiting for the square
of the train in the distance, there is

nothing else, when you are sealed like this
in rainlight. And the parting shot
not to the passenger comfortably

heading away to end
of termination point – eventual horizon
but something done

in the outdoor location of a pasture
or gentle hills: an overhead, why not,
with the smoke billowing like a dark gray

ink stain on the landscape. Or the wheels
dragging across agriculture, camera obscura
bovine among the crops

and the last not human
but scarecrow fallen,
a cowcatcher stuck in its face.

BRAVE NEW SCHOOLS: Principal apologizes for prayer/poem

2004-12-04T20:13:00.000-06:00

© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

The principal of a Georgia high school apologized to parents and students yesterday for reading "The New School Prayer" over the intercom.

Tommy Craft, principal of Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, Ga., was forced to apologize after fielding complaints about the prayer, which he read last Tuesday before Thanksgiving break, the Associated Press reported.

The prayer, which is in the form of a poem, ridicules political correctness and the banishing of religion from public schools. Craft said he simply wanted to provoke thought and discussion among students about the changing political climate in public schools.

"I apologized to them today in another statement,'' Craft said, according to the news service. "I said that there was no attempt to individualize or to bring ridicule on any particular person with the poem.''

The prayer, which uses a rhyming format, has been circulating on the Internet for years. It laments that organized prayer is not allowed in public schools, but says students can "dress like freaks, and pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks'' or "elect a pregnant Senior Queen.''

Says the poem: "They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible. To quote the Good Book makes me liable."

According to AP, some parents complained to both Craft and Clarke County School Superintendent Lewis Holloway.

"Basically, I found the poem offensive, but even if I didn't, I still would believe it crossed the line between church and state,'' Ginger Smith, whose daughter is a junior at Cedar Shoals, told the news service.

Holloway told AP the district had received "several calls'' from people who were upset about the poem. He would not say what, if any, disciplinary action will be taken against Craft.
It is not known who wrote "The New School Prayer." Here is the poem Craft read:

Now I sit me down in school
Where praying is against the rule.

For this great nation under God
Finds mention of Him very odd.

If Scripture now the class recites,
It violates the Bill of Rights.

And anytime my head I bow
Becomes a federal matter now.

Our hair can be purple, orange or green,
That's no offense; it's a freedom scene.

The law is specific, the law is precise.
Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice.

For praying in a public hall
Might offend someone with no faith at all.

In silence alone we must meditate,
God's name is prohibited by the state.

We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks,
And pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks.

They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible.
To quote the Good Book makes me liable.

We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen,
And the "unwed daddy,'' our Senior King.

It's "inappropriate'' to teach right from wrong,
We're taught that such "judgments'' do not belong.

We can get our condoms and birth controls,
Study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles.

But the Ten Commandments are not allowed,
No word of God must reach this crowd.

It's scary here I must confess,
When chaos reigns the school's a mess.

So, Lord, this silent plea I make:
Should I be shot, my soul please take!
Amen.

___________________________________________________________

Is it just me, or isn't it a First Amendment Right to not have speech impeded? "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

I wonder if the irony was intentional in putting these two clauses in the same Amendment? Some may argue that Church v. State issues were violated with the reading of the above prayer/poem. I see no basis for that argument. There was wisdom in the orignal framers of the Constitution in promoting the free excercise OF religion; not some mandate FROM religion. Our plurastic culture has grown richer by its account; that is, until free speech enters the mix.

I can respect the freedom of my fist's right to pursue happiness ends at the tip of your nose. I know the pendulum there swings both ways. What I find intolerable is that my right to speak freely in a public place about issues of religion/morality is now, up for vote to determine whether or not such speech and under what conditions I may be committing a "hate" crime. http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_hat11.htm

Extrapolating this to the absurd is this example:
The song MONEY FOR NOTHING contains the lyrics "little fagot got his own jet airplane/ little fagot is a millionaire." None of us believe that Mark Knopfler, who wrote the song, was intending fagot to mean a bundle of wood! Fagot is a derogatory epiphet for a homosexual. The etymology is that bundles of wood were once used to burn such people at the stake. Should I at some point in the future play that song while in the presence of one who becomes offended and is willing to bring me up on charges what protection will I enjoy in terms of free speech or freedom of expression? What redress of grievances will I have? Thankfully the USA is not at that point yet - our Canadian neighbors are though; and State Bill 1234 in California would appear dangerously close.

Here's another bit of irony, each session of Congress opens with a Christian chaplain reciting Christian prayers. The Supreme Court building of the United States has the image of Moses and the Ten Commmandments prominently displayed, yet ruled against Alabama chief justice Roy Moore for having the Ten Commandments on public display in that state's highest court building's rotunda.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/08/22/ten.commandments/ Now if that isn't the summit of hypocrisy and irony I am hard pressed to say anymore what is!

I don't like the "NEW SCHOOL PRAYER" poem. I think it is doggerel. But I will defend the author's right to create and speak those words; just as I will defend my black friends' right to call each other nigga; just as will defend Mark Knopfler's right to use the word fagot in his song, and just as I will defend your right to disagree with anything I write; to the death. I would like to think you would do the same for me. -Wayne

Stripped to shadow

2004-12-04T15:31:00.000-06:00

Does light break and fall
tunneling through your body
that instant when we
KNOW that we are known?

When you are floating
months on end
do you hear the seraph song
up close
or merely the echo of distant melodies?

After when you saw your child
having grown two whole inches
speaking in full sentences
did you realize what was lost?

Should someone ask
if black and blue
are good colors for
such an innocent soul
are you offended?

Watching alder leaves turning
on themselves, their bellies
angry red, do you want to leap
from your third storey window
to save one?

Or, is it as it once was,
the late evening breeze
picking up brances
stripped to a shadow?

Notes on Being an Original Poet

2004-12-04T15:14:00.000-06:00

"I don't read anyone else's poetry. That way I can create something truly original." -- spoken by a featured reader during a NYC-area poetry reading.

As poet and sometimes host of an audio poetry reading series, I come in contact with many writers and writings, as well as many attitudes and opinions on poets and their work. But I was genuinely surprised when I heard an author tell the small group assembled to hear his poems that he deliberately did not take in other people's art, that he held himself in strict isolation from other practitioners of the art form he practiced himself. Besides the unfortunate message he sent to his audience - "Please come to hear me, but I do not want to hear you" - the artist explained with this statement the utter lack of originality that his work possessed.

The product of isolation is not originality; it is ignorance -- ignorance of precedent, of prior accomplishments, and of tools that could make your own artistry better. Can you imagine a scientist deliberately ignoring the work that came before his in his field in the hopes of making a true "discovery"?

That would stunt the growth of science, as accomplished and talented researchers wasted time learning and relearning the same principles. It is similar in poetry.

I think many of us who write have similar stories - we started writing as adolescents to give voice to the great confusions within us, writing on such grand themes as unrequited love and suicidal despair at no one understanding us. This is usually at the point in our educations when our exposure to poetry has been limited to dissecting Wordsworth and Coleridge, possibly memorizing and regurgitating some Sandburg or Merriam, maybe a little of the folksier Frost.

Focused on diagramming and translating poems into modern English, we might have read, but couldn’t yet understand the passions in the poems of the Brownings and we certainly had no experiential context from which to understand Dylan Thomas, or Eliot, or Williams, or even Frost, so we compared our words to theirs in the most literal sense, and declared what we had written to be unique.

Then we discovered what poetry could be. Maybe we reread Frost or Stevens with a post-teen understanding. Maybe we were introduced to Kinnell or Olds or Doty and found someone whose physical and sensual use of language appealed to us. Maybe a PBS video introduced us to Barks and Hirshfield and we felt the motion of the mystical in their verse. And we realized that what we had written until then was, at best, kindling for the fire of poetry burning inside us.

Some people stopped writing at that point, dejected that it had been done so much better; indeed this might be exactly what the poet who elects not to read poetry is trying to avoid. But some – and surely everyone who has stayed with this essay to this point – some began to understand that the power of these great poets was the combination of Craft, Content, and Voice: the abilities to use poetic tools (form and structure, rhythm, alliteration, concreteness, etc.), to apply them to something meaningful (very few poems about prom date dumpings persist except in bad TV-movies), and to use what is unique in your experience and your diction to present these in a new way.

Like the scientist who does not understand why the college will not accept his paper on "Why Plants Need the Sun," the poet who has not drunk from the sea of poetic history is destined to be branded a follower without ever knowing who he is following. We realized how much higher our own art could go if we could learn to build on what came before.

The joy and the art in poetry, as Pound suggested, lie in making it new. It is impossible to know the new without respecting the old.

Whose poems have you read today?

Here Now, Baptized Undone

2004-12-03T01:08:00.000-06:00

Propelled by zephyrs and black-eyed rain,
I am pursued by thoughts of who I am…

authority, rebellion, admitted abuser
of sex and viloence, the kettle left boiling
while unopened letters wait on the porch,
underemployed vagabond recalling sad
faces of wet-nosed dogs, coffee mugs
and shot glasses full of emptiness, the
undumped ashtray, the last lingering note
of San Saens’ Dance Macabre; music,
words and decay.

Haunted by ghosts, who themselves, have
become too bored with this place to stay,
I raise my fist and rear my head shouting at
heaven, “If it be Your will, let me live here
now baptized and undone; if not, fuck you,
I will be home soon enough to claim my prize!”

Enough of the foul-mouthed grandstanding.
If I am afraid, and I am, I freely confess; if I
love, and I do, I show it unashamed. If I am
human, and I am, then you are no different
than me, and together we already share heaven’s
prize. Walk with me now, the zephyr has eased,
the rain has cleansed and all the ghosts have been
put to bed. This moment is pure.

Poetry is not a luxury

2004-12-02T15:12:00.000-06:00

Renowned lesbian poet Adrienne Rich takes a searing look at war, love and other life-and-death matters in her latest book.

By KATHI WOLFE Friday, November 26, 2004
AT THIS MOMENT in America, as the Iraq war drags on and same-sex marriage bans flourish across the country, nothing is more timely than renowned lesbian writer Adrienne Rich’s poetry.
Rich, who has written of love between women, war and peace, racism and homophobia in 16 volumes of poetry and five books of non-fiction, writes boldly in her latest book of poems of the uncomfortable truths about this country in the post 9/11 era in a time of war.

“Diarrhea first question of the day/children shivering it’s September/Second question: where is my mother?,” she writes in “The School Among the Ruins,” a poem set in a schoolroom under the siege of war.

“One: I don’t know where your mother/is Two: I don’t know/why they are trying to hurt us/Three: or the latitude and longitude/of their hatred,” the teacher says later in the poem, which is the title work of Rich’s new poetry collection “The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004.” (She wrote this poem as a member of Poets Against the War, a group opposed to the war in Iraq.)

Though Rich’s work movingly describes the despair and isolation that these truths engender, she has never wanted us to be stuck in our emotional pain. She writes to explore the dialectic between “the personal, or lyric voice, and the so-called political — really, the voice of the individual speaking out just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a social realm,” she says.

“Touch food to the lips/let taste never betray you/cinnamon vanilla melting/on apple tart/but what you really craved/a potency of words,” Rich writes in “For June, in the Year 2001,” an elegy for the late June Jordan, an African-American poet and writer who identified as bisexual. (Jordan succumbed to breast cancer two years ago.)

BORN IN 1929, RICH has been writing highly regarded poetry for more than 50 years.
At 21, her first book of poems, “A Change of World,” won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1951. Yet, Rich’s poems were criticized in male-dominated poetry circles when she began writing about women, sexuality, gender, civil rights and other political movements in the mid-1960s.
Since then her groundbreaking work, which addresses heterosexism and other subjects that were once taboo in poetry and prose, has inspired generation of lesbians, gay men and progressives. In her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich writes of “the physical passion of woman for woman which is central to lesbian existence: the erotic sexuality which has been … the most violently erased fact of female experience.”
Yet women have resisted “compulsory heterosexuality,” Rich says, “at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism and extreme poverty.”

As with Rich’s previous work, the poems in “The School Among the Ruins” connect the personal with the political. There is the wonderful love poem “Memorize This” where she writes: “One loses an earring the other finds it/One says I’d rather make love/Then go to the Greek Festival/The other, I agree.”

Others are a searing denunciation of our culture in this time.
“The School Among the Ruins” is by turns witty, touching, engaging and a ringing call to political action. But sequences like the prose poems “Usonian Journals 2000,” which uses the techniques of film noir and complex language, can be a difficult read.

Despite the demands that Rich’s poetry makes, readers who care about language, love and resistance to war will want to read this book.
“Poetry is not a luxury,” she says.
This is true now more than ever.

________________________________________

One of the things I find remarkable about the arts in general and poetry writers specifically is the proclivity toward exploitation of the artist's sexuality. In the days when being homosexual was morally tabboo being "outed" was equal to being branded a devil.
I remember reading once, that Rimbaud's relationship with Paul Verlain could have been a contributing factor to his extended hiatus to Africa, and his never writing again. Though I seriously doubt that it had anything to do with his decision. The exploitation factor is still present in its being proffered.

Fast forward to the late twentieth century when once morally acceptable dogmas have been relaxed or seemingly abandoned altogether and we have people openly declaring their homsexuality.
Expoiting it for opposite reasons; wearing it as a badge of courage. I am left wondering, "what is the point?"

Personally, I won't tell you my orientation. I don't think it is important- I have used and abused sex not only in writing but in life generally. I have exploited and been exploited. Haven't we all? Don't all of us have struggles with those Victorian mores that continue to haunt us centuries later?

The sex card has become passe. Desensitized to it, culturally, as Americans have become, I do not see its relevence any longer. So when a journalist such as Kathi Wolfe mentions Adrienne Rich's lesbain lifestyle, I say "big deal. Can she write? Is she someone who I want to read?" These are the bigger questions and the answer is, Yes. Not because of Rich being gay, rather despite it.

-Wayne

The War on Words

2004-12-01T23:55:00.000-06:00

Reading is a democratic activity, and theocracies discourage it. Khomeini's Iran and the Soviet Union had similarly degraded views of literature - and Bush's America is heading the same way.

I start from the position that theocracy is one of the least desirable of all forms of political organisation, and that democracy is a good deal better. But the real division is not between those states that are secular, and therefore democratic, and those that are religious, and therefore totalitarian. I think there is another fault line that is more fundamental and more important than religion. You don't need a belief in God to have a theocracy.

Here are some characteristics of religious power:

There is a holy book, a scripture whose word is inerrant, whose authority is above dispute:
as it might be, the works of Karl Marx.

There are prophets and doctors of the church, who interpret the holy book and pronounce on its meaning: as it might be, Lenin, Stalin, Mao.

There is a priesthood with special powers, which can confer blessings and privileges on the laity, or withdraw them, and in which authority tends to concentrate in the hands of elderly men:
as it might be, the communist party.

There is the concept of heresy and its punishment: as it might be, Trotskyism.

There is an inquisition with the powers of a secret police force:
as it might be, the Cheka, the NKVD, etc.

There is a complex procedural apparatus of betrayal, denunciation, confession, trial and execution: as it might be, the Stalinist terror under Yezhov and Beria and the other state inquisitors.

There is a teleological view of history, according to which human society moves inexorably towards a millennial fulfilment in a golden age: as it might be, the dictatorship of the proletariat, as described by dialectical materialism.

There is a fear and hatred of external unbelievers: as it might be, the imperialist capitalist powers.

There is a fear and hatred of internal demons and witches: as it might be, kulaks or bourgeois deviationists.

There is the notion of pilgrimage to sacred places and holy relics: as it might be, the birthplace of Stalin, or the embalmed corpses in Red Square.

And so on, ad nauseam. In fact, the Soviet Union was one of the most thoroughgoing theocracies the world has ever seen, and it was atheist to its marrow. In this respect, the most dogmatic materialist is functionally equivalent to the most fanatical believer, Stalin's Russia exactly the same as Khomeini's Iran. It isn't belief in God that causes the problem.

The root of the matter is quite different. It is that theocracies don't know how to read, and democracies do.

To begin with, the theocratic cast of mind has low expectations of literature. It thinks that the function of novels and poetry is to present a clear ideological viewpoint, and nothing else. This is brilliantly shown in Azar Nafisi's recent book, Reading Lolita in Tehran (4th Estate, 2004). The author, a professor of English literature in Iran during the rule of the Ayatollah Khomeini, tells of her attempts to continue teaching the books she wanted to teach in the increasingly fanatical and narrow-minded atmosphere of the period following the Islamic revolution. In order to discuss the work of Nabokov, Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen or Henry James, she had to resort to various stratagems: to pretend to put the book on trial so as to elicit a "safe" defence of it, to meet with a small group of trustworthy students in her own home and so on.

At one point she is describing the attitude of the authorities to the sort of books she finds most valuable: "Unable to decipher or understand complications or irregularities, angered by what they considered betrayals in their own ranks, the officials were forced to impose their simple formulas on fiction as they did on life. Just as they censored the colors and tones of reality to suit their black-and-white world, they censored any form of interiority in fiction; ironically, for them as for their ideological opponents, works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous. Thus, in a writer such as Austen, for example, whether they knew it or not, they found a natural adversary."

Works of imagination that did not carry a political message were deemed dangerous - that is, an overt political message. Nafisi is too subtle a reader to think that Jane Austen, or any other great writer, is devoid of political implications, echoes, correspondences; but if they don't stand up and wave a flag and shout slogans, they're invisible, and hence suspect.
And that is true for believers and atheists alike. Here is an extract from a famous resolution of the central committee of the all-union communist party of August 14 1946:

"Recently in Zvezda magazine, along with important and worthwhile works of Soviet writers, there have appeared many worthless, ideologically harmful works. A crude mistake of Zvezda is the offering of a literary platform to the writer MM Zoshchenko, whose productions are alien to Soviet literature. The editorial staff of Zvezda is well aware that Zoshchenko has long specialised in writing empty, vapid and vulgar things, in spreading putrid nonsense, vulgarity and indifference to politics, so as to mislead our young people and poison their consciousness... In addition, Zvezda in every way popularises work by the authoress Akhmatova, whose literary and socio-political physiognomy has been known to Soviet people for a long, long time. Akhmatova is a typical exponent of empty, frivolous poetry that is alien to our people. Permeated by the scent of pessimism and decay, redolent of old-fashioned salon poetry, frozen in the positions of bourgeois-aristocratic aestheticism and decadence - "art for art's sake" - not wanting to progress forward with our people, her verses cause damage to the upbringing of our youth and cannot be tolerated in Soviet literature."

The charge of indifference to politics: there it is again. It is a consistent theme. In 1929, the writer Boris Pilnyak had been denounced by the Stalinist Literary Gazette for offences including "apoliticalness (not being a communist)" (Ian MacDonald, The New Shostakovich 1990). What it amounts to is that if a literary work doesn't openly support your side, then it must be empty, and ought to be condemned.

So the trouble with the way theocracies read is that they have a narrow idea of what literature is: they think it only contains one kind of thing, and has only one purpose, which is a narrowly political one. This is true even of some apparent supporters of literature, such as the leftist activists described by Nafisi, who defended Scott Fitzgerald against the attacks of the Muslim activists on the grounds that "we needed to read fiction like The Great Gatsby because we needed to know about the immorality of American culture. They felt we should read more revolutionary material, but we should read books like this as well, to understand the enemy." The theocratic cast of mind is always reductive whether it's in power or not.

The second charge against the theocracies is that they only know one mode of reading. Because they think there is only one way that books can work, they have only one way of responding to them, and when they try to apply the one way they know to a text that doesn't respond to that reading, trouble follows. There is a good description of two different modes of reading in Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (2001). Armstrong is eloquent on the difference between mythos and logos, fundamentally different ways of apprehending the reality of the world. Mythos deals with meaning, with the timeless and constant, with the intuitive, with what can only be fully expressed in art or music or ritual. Logos, by contrast, is the rational, the scientific, the practical; that which can be taken apart and put together again; that which is susceptible to logical explanation.

Both are necessary, both are to be cherished. However, they engage with different aspects of the world, and these days, says Armstrong, they are not equally valued. Her argument is that in modern times, because of the astonishing progress of science and technology, people in the western world "began to think that logos was the only means to truth, and began to discount mythos as false and superstitious". This resulted in the phenomenon of fundamentalism, which, despite its own claims to be a return to the old true ways of understanding the holy book, is not a return of any kind, but something entirely new: "Protestant fundamentalists read the Bible in a literal, rational way that is quite different from the more mystical, allegorical approach of pre-modern spirituality."

Not only Protestants, we might add, and not only the Bible. In March 2002, news sources around the world reported the publication of a story in several Saudi newspapers about a fire in a school in Mecca. According to the reports, the mutaween, the Saudi religious police, stopped schoolgirls from leaving the blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress. Fifteen girls died as a result. One witness said that he saw three policemen "beating young girls to prevent them from leaving the school because they were not wearing the abaya" (the black robe required by the kingdom's strict interpretation of Islam). The father of one of the dead girls said that the school watchman even refused to open the gates to let the girls out. What is this but a failure to read with imaginative understanding, a triumph of literalism and the bare decoding of instructions over human empathy?

My third and final charge against the theocracies, atheist or religious, and their failure to read properly is this: that the act of true reading is in its very essence democratic.

Consider the nature of what happens when we read a book - and I mean, of course, a work of literature, not an instruction manual or a textbook - in private, unsupervised, un-spied-on, alone. It isn't like a lecture: it's like a conversation. There's a back-and-forthness about it. The book proposes, the reader questions, the book responds, the reader considers. We bring our own preconceptions and expectations, our own intellectual qualities, and our limitations, too, our own previous experiences of reading, our own temperament, our own hopes and fears, our own personality to the encounter.

And we are active about the process. We are in charge of the time, for example. We can choose when to read; we don't have to wait for a timetabled opportunity to open the covers; we can read in the middle of the night, or over breakfast, or during a long summer's evening. And we're in charge of the place where the reading happens; we're not anchored to a piece of unwieldy technology, or required to be present in a particular building along with several hundred other people. We can read in bed, or at the bus stop, or (as I used to do when I was younger and more agile) up a tree.

Nor do we have to read it in a way determined by someone else. We can skim, or we can read it slowly; we can read every word, or we can skip long passages; we can read it in the order in which it presents itself, or we can read it in any order we please; we can look at the last page first, or decide to wait for it; we can put the book down and reflect, or we can go to the library and check what it claims to be fact against another authority; we can assent, or we can disagree.

So our relationship with books is a profoundly, intensely, essentially democratic one. It places demands on the reader, because that is the nature of a democracy: citizens have to play their part. If we don't bring our own best qualities to the encounter, we will bring little away. Furthermore, it isn't static: there is no final, unquestionable, unchanging authority. It's dynamic. It changes and develops as our understanding grows, as our experience of reading - and of life itself -increases. Books we once thought great come to seem shallow and meretricious; books we once thought boring reveal their subtle treasures of wit, their unsuspected shafts of wisdom.

And we become better readers: we learn different ways to read. We learn to distinguish degrees of irony or implication; we pick up references and allusions we might have missed before; we learn to judge the most fruitful way to read this text (as myth, perhaps) or that (as factual record); we become familiar with the strengths and duplicities of metaphor, we know a joke when we see one, we can tell poetry from political history, we can suspend our certainties and learn to tolerate the vertigo of difference.

Of course, democracies don't guarantee that real reading will happen. They just make it possible. Whether it happens or not depends on schools, among other things. And schools are vulnerable to all kinds of pressure, not least that exerted by governments eager to impose "targets", and cut costs, and teach only those things that can be tested. One of the most extraordinary scenes I've ever watched, and one which brings everything I've said in this piece into sharp focus, occurs in the famous videotape of George W Bush receiving the news of the second strike on the World Trade Center on 9/11. As the enemies of democracy hurl their aviation-fuel-laden thunderbolt at the second tower, their minds intoxicated by a fundamentalist reading of a religious text, the leader of the free world sits in a classroom reading a story with children. If only he'd been reading Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, or Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad, or a genuine fairy tale! That would have been a scene to cheer. It would have illustrated values truly worth fighting to preserve. It would have embodied all the difference between democratic reading and totalitarian reading, between reading that nourishes the heart and the imagination and reading that starves them.

But no. Thanks among other things to his own government's educational policy, the book Bush was reading was one of the most stupefyingly banal and witless things I've ever had the misfortune to see. My Pet Goat (you can find the text easily enough on the internet, and I can't bring myself to quote it) is a drearily functional piece of rubbish designed only to teach phonics. You couldn't read it for pleasure, or for consolation, or for joy, or for wisdom, or for wonder, or for any other human feeling; it is empty, vapid, sterile.

But that was what the president of the United States, and his advisers, thought was worth offering to children. Young people brought up to think that that sort of thing is a real book, and that that sort of activity is what reading is like, will be in no position to see that, for example, it might be worth questioning the US National Park Service's decision to sell in their bookstores a work called Grand Canyon: A Different View, which claims that the canyon was created, like everything else, in six days. But then it may be that the US is already part way to being a theocracy in the sense I mean, one in which the meaning of reading, and of reality itself, is being redefined. In a recent profile of Bush in the New York Times, Ron Suskind recalls: "In the summer of 2002, a senior adviser to Bush told me that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community', which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works any more,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.'"

The democracy of reading exists in the to-and-fro between reader and text, when each is free to engage honestly with the other. The democracy of politics needs the same freedom and honesty in the public realm: freedom from lies and distortions about other candidates, honesty about one's own actions and programmes and sources of information. It's difficult. It's strenuous. The sort of effort it takes was never very common, but it seems to be rarer now than it was. It is quite easy for democracies to forget how to read.

A Poet Is Made, Not Born

2004-12-01T21:59:00.000-06:00

A Poet Is Made, Not Born:

"Some poets carve, chisel, and polish their poems over long periods of time, whereas others produce their poems in an intense, fevered moment of inspiration. In fact, sometimes the same poet will use both methods.

The poem produced in such an intense flurry of composition is not necessarily less well put together or polished than the one carefully constructed and revised over time. It all depends on the poet and the poem.

A poet's mind, including his subconscious--nay, especially his subconscious--is prepared ground. If the poet has done his homework, which is to say, if he has trained his poetic sensibilities and skills by meticulous observation, study, and practice, then he can often turn the creative process entirely over to his subconscious, or nearly so.

The more excellent poetry you read, then the more your mind's operations will be shaped by poetic structures. The more carefully you attend to observation, to really experiencing the complexity and intensity of the world's details, the less likely you are to view your experience of life through the lens of cliche.

In An Essay on Criticism (which is actually a long poem written in heroic couplets), eighteenth-century poet Alexander Pope says, 'True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed' (297-298*).

To read the remainder of Tina Blue's essay please click the link above.

Madmen Mine

2004-12-01T01:45:00.000-06:00

Not a fourth that walks alongside me,
but half a dozen or more.
Whether at twilight or daybreak
or at blinding noon,
a motley review of fiends
that no door defends.—

One like a kind of Jean Debuffet,
hands scrawled uncertain and purple;
a harelipped and hunchbacked oaf
with a smile like a rotten cassaba rind,
who gawks and gabs on the way I do
when the mind is depleted and tired
and the houseguests are too drunk to care:
a savage clown, who shudders and suddenly
becomes a man with a mouth of cotton
trapped in a dentist's chair unable to
form words or scream.

Not a fourth that walks alongside me,
but half a dozen or more:
One with his face gone putrid,
most monstrous of all, whose skeleton shrieks
on the sidewalk like fingernails on slate
ripping open some ill-hinged portal
of memory. Down the hall we breach
a thousand sterile rooms that peel the hours back,
that ominously silhouette the walls
with shades torn from war, accusatory and rigid,
black as the sidewalk alley paths
we are terrified to take.
The bones fall to the floor. I cry.

Not a fourth that walks alongside me,
but half a dozen, or more
than biceps or brain can bear –
A cyclops with a stinging eye,
A coward with Charles Manson hair,
matted and down to his knees,
murderers, rapists, liars, thieves,
inching closer in darkened rows
through sunlight and moontipped air
until all at once the eyelids close,
snapped like the blades of a knife,
and dreams of their death begin that
I may live in freedom hitherto unknown.
______________________________________________

The idea of "Art Brut" appeared around 1945. Its conception is generally attributed to the French painter Jean Dubuffet who meant by the term "works executed by those immune to artistic culture in which imitation has no role; in which their creators take all (subjects, materials, transposition, rhythm, style etc.) from their own individuality and not from the base of classical art or stylish trends". One can understand from this definition that parctitioners of "Art Brut" are mentally or socially marginal: prisoners, patients of psychiatric hospitals or other institutions, originals, solitary beings, condemned, all individuals who have a social status removed from the constraints of cultural conditioning. Their work is conceived and executed outside of that which we normally regard as the domain of the Fine Arts; that is to say, schools, galleries, museums, etc. These works are, therefore, conceived without consideration of the usual recipients of artistic production - in fact, without consideration of any specific destination. This rupture with collectivity and this indifference for the rules of comportment and expression can be considered a pathological element in the medical sense. Nevertheless, this idea encourages the exercise and blossoming of mental virtues that ordinarily are stifled in the "norma" person. Whoever desires in art a disorientation and a heat of the spirit will find it in "Art Brut". Since 1945, Jean Dubuffet has searched for "extra cultural" works in psychiatric hospitals, especially in Switzerland and France, by the spiritual mediums, and by the renegades of the society in general. Although the collection was never normally accessible to the public at large, it nevertheless exercised a huge fascination. The poem above is an excercise in words that hopefully captures something of this artistic movement. After writing it and posting the information below, I confess, I checked for the content of singular pronouns. -Wayne

Entrances: How to Get into a Poem When the Front Door Seems Barred

2004-12-01T01:02:00.000-06:00

Entrances: How to Get into a Poem When the Front Door Seems Barred: "Entrances: How Do We Get into a Poem if the Front Door Seems Barred?

by Tina Blue
December 29, 2000

One thing I frequently hear from my students is the lament, 'I just don't understand poetry.' Ironically, I have encountered the same comment from time to time from people who love poetry and who even write it themselves.

I think those who feel at a loss when it comes to understanding poetry would be comforted to know that a lot of English teachers also don't understand poetry, even a lot of those who teach it! That does explain one reason why poetry is so abysmally taught in our schools. ..."

Suicidal Poets

2004-12-01T00:33:00.000-06:00

Suicidal Poets:

"The writings of poets of various nationalities who committed suicide contain words and language patterns that give clues about their eventual fate, researchers said on Tuesday.

Using a computer program that examines word usage in written texts, the researchers analyzed 156 poems written by nine poets who committed suicide and 135 poems written by nine poets who did not. They found that the suicidal poets gravitated toward words indicating their detachment from other people and preoccupation with themselves.

'The key finding is that we were able to distinguish features of people's mental health by the language they use,' said James Pennebaker, a University of Texas psychology professor who conducted the research along with University of Pennsylvania graduate student Shannon Wiltsey Stirman. 'The words we use, especially what often appear to be the unimportant words, say a lot about who we are, what we're thinking and how we're approaching the world,' The study appears in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine. "

The Seattle Times: Arts & Entertainment: Legendary poet/activist Gary Snyder finds his voice again

2004-11-30T16:03:00.000-06:00

The Seattle Times: Arts & Entertainment: Legendary poet/activist Gary Snyder finds his voice again: "Legendary poet/activist Gary Snyder finds his voice again "

Gary Snyder is back on the trail with a new collection of poems

2004-11-29T21:58:00.000-06:00

Gary Snyder is back on the trail with a new collection of poems: "Gary Snyder is back on the trail with a new collection of poems"

Poetry as Healer

2004-11-21T15:36:00.000-06:00

Poetry as Healer:

"The marriage of poetry and medicine goes way back. In ancient Egypt, sacred words were chanted in rituals to promote healing. Ancient Greeks left poems in shrines in remembrance of their healing. And the spoken word is integral to Native American traditional medicine. 'Poetry and medicine are so closely intertwined,' Dr. Coulehan said. 'When you go back in history and think about how healing occurred in traditional societies, most healing was [related to] the power of the word.' "

Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies Home Page

2004-11-19T16:30:00.000-06:00

Kurzweil CyberArt Technologies Home Page: "A screen saver that writes poetry, a Poet's Assistant that helps you write poetry (and song lyrics!), and 50 professionally - designed 'poet personalities.'"

This is a really fun & FREE program to run. No, I am not getting any
kick-backs to promote it. I only want to share because its a high-tech
poetry generator that deserves some attention.

You could call it 'artificial intelligence' and given its success
may one day put the human poet out of business. Probably not, but
with chess programs like Big Blue already beating human GrandMasters
who's to say that it wouldn't be possible?

Canzonet to the City of Chicago

2004-11-19T15:04:00.000-06:00

Canzonet to the City of Chicago

-After Frederico Garcia Lorca

It rains over the city of Chicago
population two million-eight hundred-
ninety-six thousand, sixteen;
my sweet songs.

Early, Lake Michigan soaks it in
releasing her white scent of onions
and golden daffodils. Enfolding
a shadowy sun.

It rains in Chicago
in the deep concrete night.
Slips of stars and sleep
curtain her empty moon.

Watch how the rain
puddles the streets; lament
of pedestrians, commuters,
and homeless masses.

Watch how the dancing
winds vanquish ash and dust
across her inland sea.

Ash and dust of her inland sea,
Chicago, my love, far from the sun.
Rain washes clean our common
memories, delivers me trembling
to the Addison Street Station
where we meet again this morning.

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

2004-11-17T23:50:00.000-06:00

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com: "STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Swedish poets have broadcast their work into outer space by radio to give alien life forms -- if they exist -- a taste of earthling literature. "

Parliament of Canada - The Parliamentary Poet Laureate - Home Page

2004-11-17T16:38:00.000-06:00

Parliament of Canada - The Parliamentary Poet Laureate - Home Page: "Ottawa, November 17, 2004 � The Speaker of the Senate, the Honourable Dan Hays, and Speaker of the House of Commons, the Honourable Peter Milliken, today announced the appointment of Mrs. Pauline Michel as the Parliamentary Poet Laureate. Mrs. Michel, of Montreal, Quebec, is the second poet to hold this office. "

Shaping A Poem

2004-11-17T16:19:00.000-06:00

Art begins with selection. You have only a certain space in which to place your words — a very small space with current views on poetry — and those words need to be effectively organized. Think carefully in choosing the right form for your work.

Consider performance poetry, possibly the least organized of genres. Even the casual impromptu piece grows out of the occasion and expectations of the audience. The piece may only exist in the performer's head, but in place of the traditional lines on the page there will be an acute sense of timing, an emotional rapport with the audience, a sequence of themes developed and returned to. None of this is easy, and good performers, like standup comics, practise their skills endlessly. *The poem immediately following this article is a prime example of a poem that works the performance angle.*

Poetry may therefore seem formless, and a good deal of contemporary work may indeed be little more than chopped-up prose, but behind all the better poems are structures made the more effective by being unobtrusive. Poems that appear just right, with not a word too many or out of place, are usually the result of prolonged effort and skill, an example of art that conceals art. But note the word conceals. Readers distrust poems that have too obvious a design upon them. In traditional poetry the very shape — metre, rhyme and stanza — creates an emotional distance that helps the poem gain in universality: it speaks to and for our common humanity. In contrast, contemporary styles aim at "a slice of life." Universal appeal is not guaranteed, and greater skill is needed in ensuring results appear natural, authentic and convincing. If the reader's response is "so what?" then the poem has failed, whatever the style being followed. Few rules exist in contemporary poetry, beyond the ceaseless experimenting in poetry forms to find what "works" for the piece in question.

Some thoughts to keep in mind:

1. Remember that style simply provides the means: it does not guarantee success. Rearranging undistinguished prose in short lines will not thereby create poetry. Nor will making it rhyme or scan. Of anything announcing itself as poetry a good deal is expected, and failures are the more ludicrous. You must employ the devices of whatever style you chose to create something that cannot be so fully said in prose.

2. In choosing a style, be guided by what the better lines suggest.

3. Write drafts in both free and strict forms. The skills are different but interact.

4. Research how recognized poets have handled your theme.

Mad Dog Murray's Sexual Muddle Model

2004-11-16T18:51:00.000-06:00

Dear readers, Presented here for your reading enjoyment is a work
by Alasdair Murray. A shining example of post-modernist poetics, at least that
is my opinion. Comment as you feel compelled. Or drop Alasdair a line at:
alasdairmurray@hotmail.com

Martian men and Venusian women,
A thought to conjure with.
Only women can multi-task,
Now that’s provocative!
As I read and pondered,
Saw bright red and wondered,
Simultaneously,
I disagreed with me and he,
Most philosophically.

I can multi-task – I must be female,
Heavy hammer straight-striking nail!

Mad Dog I may be,
It’s my prime degree,
But not because I’m lunatic,
Or raving round and bent.
I’m just a household brick
On brickly-vision intent.
If I’m now a lady,
I know it sounds quite crazy,
I must be lesbian –
Don’t fancy Bill or Dick,
Dave, Jim, Will, les, Ian.
Then the penny dropped,
My confusion stopped,
The lock-key clicked.

An octagonal model sprang to mind,
Four nodes on the left, as men,
Four on the right – women,
(Canons to the left, tigers to the right!),
Representing outward sexual kind,
Dicks and tits, and other bits
That give the first impression.
Inward emotion
And sexual orientation
To be detail more refined.

In its simplest state – four types,
Sorts of state of mind, if you like:
Hetero-he,
Hetero-she,
Homo-he,
Homo-she,
Each of these could co-exist, co-be

With either physical form,
He or she, you know, the norm (!?)
Each its own psyche,
e.g.
A multi-tasking, male-bodied, lady-lover,
Quite clearly
A he homo-she;
A single-threading, she-bodied, lady-lover,
Obviously
A she hetero-he.
Do you see?

The model formed quite elegantly,
Became, ipso facto, an entity.
Down the left I’d charted,
By the four octagon points
He – hetero-he,
He – homo-he,
He – hetero-she,
He – homo-she.
On the right I’d started
The mirrored counter-point,
She – hetero-he,
She – homo-he,
She – hetero-she
She – homo-she.
The symmetry delighted me.
I hope you’re all following me?

Then came the tricky bits,
How to present relationships.
Like a bolt it hit,
My psycho-gambit,
Join each and every point
With lines to signify
Why you, they and I,
Need a big fat joint!
So many possibilities
For incompatibilities,
I found it really freaky.

Are you still with me
Dear patient … Reader?
If not – then, maybe,
Sketch it out,
Erase all doubt,
You’ll soon see
What struck me -
Freud and Gray no sentient leaders.
An astro-zodiac chart,
Not retro-maniac art.

Happy with this ingenious invention,
Breaking all known convention,
I sought a name to tag it,
Suitable to flag it,
For minds to bend, bounce, bewilder, boggle –
“Mad Dog Murray’s Sexual Muddle Model”!

Alasdair Murray, Monday 15th November 2004

All rights reserved. Used by kind permission of Alasdair Murray

The e-Writer`s Place The e-Writer's Place

2004-11-16T03:06:00.000-06:00

The e-Writer`s Place The e-Writer's Place: "Poetry has vanished as a cultural force in America. If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make it essential once more. "

Dying Young

2004-11-16T01:39:00.000-06:00

Dying Young: St. Jude's Children Hospital Bedside
for Demitri Karakas

You loved the solidarity of blue
in the sky co-mingling with
white clouds. The radiant gold sun warming
your cheeks; summer's diaphonous green,
the crystal webs of morning dew strewn
like a net of diamonds on the grass.

You loved a girl, bright and fair,
more resplendant than the moon.
More fragrant than a budding orchard;
purer than first spring rain.

~~~

I, too, vainly imagined finding fortune
together in this wide expanse of world,
when shackles would fall from feet,
when the chains of the gods would break.

We devised heroic labors-
impossible tasks worthy
of Prometheus and Sisyphus;
punished and unattained.

~~~

As a vermillion leafed oak
weeping and worm-holed within
which refuses to rot or petrify;
old before your time.
You are dying young, too soon,
fledgling strength, new, untried,
future deeds unrealized.

I will bear with you to our common end.
I shall bear the love and memory of a maiden,
of this world,this great, wide, wonderful world,
pruned like a turning bud.

Though you will not see its blooming,
yet I shall keep it for you safe in my heart
as you enter that final rest in the stone garden,
offering no outward surrender.

...Please, you say, hold my hand
and tell me once more ofsunlight on my cheeks,
the wonders of this world and the love of a girl...

That is exactly what I did.

by wayneosar

Author's Comments:"Demetri had a disease called Progeria, also known as premature aging. He lived for 13 years but his body was that of a seventy-eighty year old. I used to tell him stories before he died. He is missed."

BAAAAAAAAAD POETRY!!!!!!!

2004-11-15T02:58:00.000-06:00

The Bad Poetry Seminar

There is a Bad Poetry Explosion,and you can be part of it! Thus begins The Bad Poetry Seminar by Sparrow, which teaches the undeniable truth about today's Poetry Renaissance: Poetry is on the upswing and much of what is being written is bad -- really bad. Now, there are those who will tell you that bad poetry is actually good, and although I wouldn't go quite that far, bad poetry does have its place. The fact is, at slams and open mikes across the country, actually at just about any poetry reading you go to, you're bound to hear some doozies and you'll have to admit, bad poetry makes the good stuff really shine.

So, without further ado, sharpen your wits and pencils and get ready for the Bad Poetry Seminar. With a click of the mouse you'll:(a) discover how rapidly the percentage of bad poetry is rising,(b) explore the history of bad poetry,(c) learn how to differentiate a good bad poem, a mediocre bad poem and a bad bad poem, &(d) join in chanting the Bad Poetry Anthem.Once you feel like you've got a handle on things, try your hand at writing a few stinkers yourself. There are a host of resources out there just waiting to critique your work and even some set-up to help you whip up a masterpiece on the fly. Who knows, once you've finished your course of study, you may even be ready to start up your own seminar.

IS your poetry bad? Don't fret, simply point your browser this way for a few pointers: Very Bad Poetry: A truly unique anthology of 131 poems so glaringly awful that they embody a kind of genius, from Fred Emerson Brook's appalling “The Stuttering Lover” to William Wordsworth's atrocious “The Thorn.” Compare yourself to the masters of bad poetry.

Chatfield Software Poetry Power: Poetry software, publishing advice, contests and awards, and a multimedia poetry page. Ask Dr. Poetry and he'll be more than happy to help you unlock the mysteries of the poetic universe. Alien Flower: where poetry-lovers practice poetry. International Haiku for beginners: Do you believe that less is more? Get a few tips on old world short form.

Feeling in need of some inspiration? Let the Web help you create the perfect poem:20 consonant poetry: Face the challenge of using all 20 consonants and push your poetry envelope.
Electro Magnetic Poetry: “A click and drag diversion” inspired by the Magnetic Poetry Kit. . . refrigerator-magnet poetry comes to the Web, bringing you hours of doodling fun. If you're not Java-capable, try the CGI version.

Think you're incapable of writing a bad poem? Well then, test your poetic prowess in one of these poetry contests:The Academy of American Poets awards a host of prizes each year.
The International Library of Poetry has published anthologies including the work of more than 100,000 (!) poets, awarding prizes totalling more than $150,000. Beware -- they may want you to purchase the book containing your poem for a steep price!Consult Our own collection of online poetry contests to find a current one open for your entry.

home introduction to bad poetry a brief history case in point practice makes perfect

Deeper, Farther Back and Faster

2004-11-15T02:16:00.000-06:00

Billie Holiday "Lady Day"

Deeper, Farther Back and Faster

for lady day

Music heaving from her breast
writhing at salacious rhythm
teasing gabardine and taffeta.

Her silent hips hypnotizing
a room full of voyeurs;
rivulets of pure carnality
from the primordial environs
of jazz-

Where vibrations heat cool souls.
Where eyes more articulate than
Medusa’s thousand-tongues watch
rapt by seraphic song.

A bridge of eyes transfixed with
consenting smiles eager to be defiled.

Revel in this, her movement, her charm;
those silent hips and heaving breasts
leading us deeper, farther back and faster
to some unknown native land where
children dance in swing-step and every
mystery is revealed in her voice – Jazz…

2004-11-14T16:30:00.000-06:00

Even if you are already writing poetry and expressing yourself in verse, it can be a good idea to step back, to return to the basics and build up from there. And if you are just starting to explore poem-writing, it is even more important to begin small. In this part of the Beginner's Guide to Writing Poetry, you'll find some basic exercises that will help illustrate where poetry comes from. More importantly, they will help you find out where your poetry comes from.
So even if you consider yourself an old pro, pause a while and try these poetry exercises. I think you'll find that if you work on them seriously, you can improve your poetry -- no matter how good you already are. And, if nothing else, they're kind of fun.
Word Association
We all know how to play word association games: one person says a word, the next person says the first word they think of after that, and so on. Many words already have built-in associations, too; when someone says "cold," we often think "wet," or "ice," or "dark." The point of this exercise, though, is to find out what words you associate together. The results can often be surprising, and may give the perfect subject for a poem exploring the reasons you make those associations.
For this exercise, you just need to list whatever words come into your head over a set period of time. It works best to do this for about twenty minutes, so you have time to stop being conscious of selecting words and just jot them down as they pop into your head. By the end of the twenty minutes, you should have some interesting sequences of words, ones that may not even seem to be related at first. Look at them and think about them, and see if you can figure out why you thought of them so close together.
Robin Skelton advocates doing this exercise every night just before bed, for at least ten nights in a row, but not more than fourteen nights. He also says you shouldn't read the lists until after the last night.
Then, surveying this confusion of diary jottings, random speculations, word games, nonsense, obscenity, facetiousness, and boredom, one usually discovers something interesting. Around the fourth or fifth day obsessive themes occur; sometimes lines of verse occur; most often, however, one discovers that one has been deeply concerned over something that one had not ever guessed to be at all important. (from The Practice of Poetry)
It is those obsessive concerns that make the best material for real poetry later on. What those concerns are may very well surprise you, which makes them especially good for exploring in verse.

Lists
Making lists is very similar to the word association exercise, except here you place each item (which may be a single word, a group of related words or a complete phrase) on a new line. There are a number of ways you can approach the making of lists, but one that works quite well is to look at an object for a few seconds (if you can get a friend to show you an object you don't know about beforehand, so much the better). Then write down whatever words occur -- whether or not they are related to the object -- for the space of two or three minutes. Don't worry yet about grouping the words or phrases onto separate lines, just write them down. Once you have a group of words, go over them again and, without changing the order of any of them, group them onto separate lines. For example, if your list was "red orange fruit tart sour juicy tingling on my tongue suck the pulp bitter white rind summer," you could arrange them as follows:
red orange fruittart sourjuicytingling on my tonguesuck the pulpbitter white rindsummer
This creates something that is beginning to look like a poem, but isn't quite. Later on, you can take such lists and rearrange, edit, cut words, add words and otherwise improve them. You could very well end up with strange and interesting poems this way.
Collage
This is another exercise I borrowed from Robin Skelton's book The Practice of Poetry. Just as collage in visual arts is the making of new pictures using bits and pieces taken from other people's photographs, paintings, and drawings, collage in poetry is making new poems using bits and pieces of other people's writing (you can use other poems for this exercise, but you can also use lines and phrases from novels, letters, scripts and all sorts of other sources). This often works best using a single volume or collection because then the lines will more likely be written in the same style, but it can be fun to play with this idea using many different sources, as well.
Here's an example I made up very quickly using Charles Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle as source material (each line was taken whole from the book, but each comes from a different page or chapter):
Darwinian Collage: Lines from The Voyage of the Beagle
How profoundly ignorant we are,so intently absorbed,composed of rounded fragments of coral;men who do not possess the instinct of those animals,a relic of an instinctive passion not decreased from the want of novelty.
They generally prefer running against the windto hear him speak to his wild brother,uttering a hoarse roar or bellowing.One cannot tell whence it comes from --peculiar to the island,it was made by some wild beast.
Perhaps these dances originally represented actions,the different islands wonderfully different.With his eyes blinded and his mouth choked,he did not understand --so many thousand miles distant,everything tends to this effect.
Interesting, but not quite poetry. Remember that this is a piece I created in a very short time; with greater care over the selection and arrangement of lines, very effective and interesting collage-poems can be created.
The advantage of this exercise is that you can concentrate on arranging the lines in an effective order (something we will explore more in Part 3 of this Guide), without having to worry about the composition of the individual lines. It's also great fun to use people's existing words and play around with their meaning by changing the order and putting together lines that were not originally related. The disadvantage, of course, is that you can't publish this kind of poetry without the permission of the people whose words you borrowed (unless you used public domain sources, in which case you should still note where the lines came from).
Once you have mastered these exercises, and are confident you have lists of associated words that are beginning to express ideas and explore concepts, you need to start working on how to put all the pieces in order. In the next section of this Guide, we'll look at how poems are ordered. Just like fiction, poetry needs a plot, though a poetic plot is not quite the same as a fictional plot.

Poet Laureate Ted Kooser to Read in Chicago

2004-11-14T14:39:00.000-06:00

Poetry Magazine

The 13th Poet Laureate of the United States, Ted Kooser, is scheduled to read at Northwestern University's Thorne Auditorium.

Find out more by clicking the link.

Admission is FREE

Tips for Poets

2004-11-13T18:36:00.000-06:00

Note: These are offered by Jon Hewitt. He doesn't guarantee they will work for everybody, and even breaks the rules whenever he feels like it. There are even some contradictions. Take what you like and forget the rest.

A poem with Love in the title (or Destiny, Hate, or other HUGE themes) already has two strikes against it (and I like love poems).

The bigger your point, the more important the details are.

Say what you want to say, let the reader decide what it means.
Don't explain EVERYTHING.

Poems that focus on form (Sonnet, Villanelle, etc.) are rarely my favorites, but most of my favorite poets learned how to write in forms before they discarded them. Writing in form is a challenge. It makes you think.

People will remember an image long after they've forgotten why it was there.
If you write a bad poem, at least you wrote.

Develop your voice. Get comfortable with how YOU write.

Don't be afraid to write from a different point of view. Write a poem that says exactly the opposite of what you believe, and do it without irony.

When you can't write, lie on the floor a while. (thank you Jon Anderson)

Untitled poems are lazy. They're like unnamed children. Obviously their parent doesn't care about them.

Write in different places. Keep a notebook. Write in a park or on a street-corner or in an alley. You don't HAVE to write about the place, but it will influence you whether you do or not.

Listen to talk radio while you write. Listen to the people who call. Great characters and voices emerge that way.

If you don't like a poem or poet, figure out exactly why. Chances are, it reflects something you don't like about your own poetry.

When nothing is coming, start writing very fast-- any word, phrase or sentence that comes to mind. Do that for about a minute, then go back to your poem. (I call this flushing.) Whether to use anything you flushed is up to you. You can, but that's not the purpose.

The more you read, the more you learn. The more you write, the more you develop.

Make a list of poems you can remember specific lines from. Go back and read those poems. Figure out why they stuck with you.

There are many excuses not to write. Try using writing as an excuse not to do other things.

Keep a dream journal. Dreams are your mind at it's most creative so listen to it. Don't feel you have to write a poem ABOUT your dreams. If you want to, fine, but the main goal is to see what thoughts the dreams lead you to.

Subscribe to poetry journals. Give back to the poetry community by reading (and paying for) the works of others. If you don't, what right have you to expect others to do it for you?

When nothing is coming for you, try analyzing someone else' s poems. (or even one of yours) Figure out what works, what doesn't work, and why. Think about what you would have done differently.

Use humor, irony, and melodrama, just don't abuse them.

Write the worst poem you can possibly write. Use cliché's, pretentious words, and beat your reader over the head with your point. Felt good, didn't it? Now get back to work. The point is, don't be afraid to write a bad poem. If it takes a hundred bad poems before you can produce a poem you like, fine, get that hundred out of the way.

Dirty limericks can be fun too.

That one perfect line in a thirty-line poem may be what makes it all worthwhile, or it may be what makes the rest of the poem bad. Keep an eye on it.

Every great poet has written a bad poem, probably hundreds, possibly thousands. They kept writing though, and so should you.

Every line of a poem should be important to the poem, and interesting to read. A poem with only 3 great lines should be 3 lines long.

Poems should progress. There should be a reason why the first stanza comes before the second, the second before the third, and so on.

Listen to criticism, and try to learn from it, but don't live or die by it. When I was in college, I would always take my best reviewed poem from the previous class and submit it for review in the next. Invariably, the next professor hated the poem, and could provide good reasons why it failed.

When you write a good poem, one you really like, immediately write another. Maybe that one poem was your peak for the night or maybe you're on a roll. There's only one way to find out.

Follow your fear. Don't back away from subjects that make you uncomfortable, and don't try to keep your personal demons off the page. Even if you never publish the poems they produce, you have to push yourself and write as honestly as possible.

Submit your poems. Sooner or later you have to send your babies out into the world to find their way. Emily Dickinson was a fluke, most people who don't publish while they're alive will never be seen or heard of -- no matter how good their poems.

I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper: On being an Original Poet

2004-11-13T15:12:00.000-06:00

Any writing that is true to your personality, authentic and original, may well begin as dark poetry. How do you generate these qualities, and then develop them?

The author's personality is always to be found in a good poem: it is something that only he or she could have produced. But we also expect that the personality will facilitate and further the poem's intentions.

The authentic is that individual voice, unquestionably theirs, which genuine artists find as they seek to represent what is increasingly important to them. Originality does not mean novelty — which is easily achieved — but the means by which experience is presented in a more distinctive and significant manner.

Personality, authenticity and originality are therefore linked, and achieved only by continual effort. Gifts and character make artists, and the two are interdependent.

As in life generally, success comes at a price. The creators of dark poetry are often:

1. indifferent to conventional procedures and behaviour,
2. inner-directed, making and following their own goals, and
3. keenly interested in contradictions and challenges.

Better poets can therefore find themselves at odds with society, and there is no doubt that such conflicts make for solitary, cross-grained and somewhat unbalanced personalities. Many past writers had difficult and neurotic personalities, and the same traits are all too evident today. Nonetheless, absurd posturing, sharp feuds and strident ambitions also appear in writers of no talent whatsoever, which suggests that difficulties are the unfortunate side affects of originality and not its sustaining force. Artists may be unbalanced sometimes, but not all unbalanced people are artists.

Creativity differs markedly between the arts and sciences, and even between different art forms. Nonetheless, most creativity shows four phases: challenge, incubation, illumination and exposition. Driving these phases forward, through many interruptions and setbacks, is the earnest desire to succeed, which naturally taps some inner need. We make poetry out of the quarrel with ourselves, said Yeats, and these fears and obsessions are highly individual. The lyric poet is very different from the dark poet, and neither of these will wish to be the poetic spokesperson of their age in the way that Tennyson, Larkin or Betjeman became in England.
Nor in the way that Whitman, Sandberg, Frost, or Penski have in America. Each had their own distinct voice, and like each of us needed to develop it along the way.

Here are a few suggestions on how originality is fostered:

1. By personal difficulties, particularly in childhood, that have been worked through. Analyse and meet these difficulties.

2. By unswerving self-honesty. Ask yourself: is this what you really hoped to write? Could you not dig deeper into the wellsprings of the poem?

3. By starting afresh, expanding your repertoire with new techniques and new themes.

4. By pacing yourselves, drawing up timetables of writing that extend and build on previous accomplishments.

5. By working in related fields: writing novels, short-stories, articles: particularly where these unlock new perspectives and energies.

The list is far from complete and is only offered as a springboard. If you have any additions, please feel free to add them to the comments.

Games | Books games Poetry Moodmatcher

2004-11-13T02:38:00.000-06:00

Guardian Unlimited Books | Games | Books games moodmatcher

Guardian Books has an awesome poetry mood generator program.
Answer some questions and it spits out a poem befitting the responses.

Here's what i got on the first go:
You're experiencing a bit of an existential crisis, aren't you? Here's a poem to help you through your long dark night of the soul.

Eel-grass

No matter what I say,
All that I really love
Is the rain that flattens on the bay,
And the eel-grass in the cove;
The jingle-shells that lie on the beach
At the tide-line, and the trace
Of higher tides along the beach:
Nothing in this place.

Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 - 1950)

Gentleness for another poet lost

2004-11-12T23:49:00.000-06:00

Curt Cobain

Gentleness
for Curt Cobain

This cannot continue:
this wild injustice of
self-murder.
How, in what year
did this come into
fashion?
Deliberate indifference
to the dead.
Their shoulders slump
and they get drunk
sometimes –
and one by one
they quit;
minstrels at a mausoleum
sing words of gentleness
to history.
What was it took his life?
What was it put that gun
between his fingers and face?
If with that voice of his,
with that appearance,
if ever they had offered him
some crumbs in life
some crumbs of gentleness.
Men live. Men die. Men are
troublemakers. Gentleness
is a posthumous honor.

Finding A Theme: some suggestions

2004-11-12T18:18:00.000-06:00

No infallible advice can be given on how to write a poem. Poets develop their own approaches in time. Nonetheless, here are a few exercises to generate the raw copy.

1. Plan. Ask yourself:

How much time is available? Opening lines can be dashed off in minutes but completion may take days or weeks. Be cautious, and aim perhaps for 5-10 lines in an evening. Don't wait for the muse, but write what you can when you can. Odd phrases and lines are at least something to work from, and more inspiring than a blank page.

When you write letters or tell stories, do you usually start from a newspaper article you've read, an anecdote told or overheard, something witnessed, a general reflection? Start a poem in the way you're most comfortable with.

What sort of poem had you in mind? A story, a comment, a tribute, a protest, an elegy, a character study, a memorial? Skim through contemporary examples to start yourself off.

Concerning the issues involved, imagine the poem were a newspaper article: what points would you make, with what evidence and resounding arguments? Got it together? Go on then: let yourself go. Something will emerge.

2. Make sure the subject's important to you. Death of a friend or family member, rites of passage, the bitter sweetness of first love, one of life's turning points, old transgressions, a childhood incident, injustices, unacknowledged fears... Use a mask of the second or third person if the content is too personal or painful, or face it full on in the style of confessional poets.

3. Give yourself up to reverie. Go for a walk, lie on the sofa and close your eyes, go to bed, cut out the surrounding world. Jot down the things that come you, in whatever order or confusion. Put the scribblings away for the present, and only open the folder hours or weeks later to see what you've got. You'll be amazed at what's inside you.

4. Free the imagination. Try:

Automatic writing. Say 5 minutes at a stretch, continuously, never stopping. Go through the material when you've collected in ten pages or so, and circle anything interesting.

Get a friend to say words at random. Write down the first response that comes to you.
Build a poem around three of the words.

Open a diary or journal (yours or someone else's) and jot down the first incident on three successive pages. Make a poem of these.

Describe, as closely as you can, some recurring dream or nightmare.
Reverse the sequence, and then make a poem.

5. Work through metaphors. Take four lines of any contemporary poem. Identify the metaphors. Then use a thesaurus to find alternatives for the metaphors. Then repeat with the alternatives, finding words even further removed from the originals. Think deeply on three or so of the more interesting words, and see if can draft a poem incorporating them.

6. Write a pastiche. Take a stanza of something well known and rewrite it so that a) the idiom is entirely different, b) the lines end with nonsense rhymes, c) the piece is ruined with the smallest possible change, d) the piece looks completely fresh and contemporary.

7. Take the last line of one of your poems (which needn't be good). Carry on from there, ignoring entirely what you drafted before.

8. Repeat some of these exercises on material swapped with a friend or poet.

Favorite Poems: Do Not Go Gentle...

2004-11-12T02:50:00.000-06:00

Dylan Thomas

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (1952)
by Dylan Thomas ---- 1914-1953

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night,

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

_________________________________________+++

Perhaps some of you will remember the television
program, Northern Exposure? The show featured
the citizens of the fictitious town of Cicely, Alaska.
My favorite character was played by John Corbett,
Chris Stevens, the local radio DeeJay. Chris would
wax poetic about any given topic and during one episode
unleashes a diatribe lauding light:

Chris Stevens
4.18, "Northern Lights"

Goethe's final words: "More light." Ever since we crawled out of that primordial slime, that's been our unifying cry: "More light." Sunlight. Torchlight. Candlight. Neon. Incandescent. Lights that banish the darkness from our caves, to illuminate our roads, the insides of our refrigerators. Big floods for the night games at Soldier's field. Little tiny flashlight for those books we read under the covers when we're supposed to be asleep. Light is more than watts and footcandles. Light is metaphor.

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom Lead Thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home— Lead Thou me on! Arise, shine, for thy light has come.

Light is knowledge. Light is life. Light is light.

[Chris quotes Psalm 119:105; Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," in Selected Poems; John Henry Newman, The Pillar of the Cloud; and Isaiah 60:1.]

It was a great episode and undoubtedly exposed a new audience to some great poetry;
yours truly included.

Writing Cycles and The Crafting of Poetry

2004-11-12T00:05:00.000-06:00

One question is often asked in poetry lessons: is there some cycle to writing? Can the process be standardized, or made more efficient?

The answer is yes, up to a point. Poets keep files of poems in various stages of construction, and work on them as circumstances permit. The various stages call on very different skills, moreover, and a working session often sees several poems being attended to at the same time.

Professional writers soon learn the elements of construction, indeed must learn, to survive in a very competitive market. The slant, number of words, diction suitable for the intended audience, quotes required, references for further reading — all these will be have been set by the publication in question, and the writer's task is simply to gather material and then shape it.

Not so poetry. Poems grow much more haphazardly: in odd directions, by fits and starts, never to foreseen conclusions or any conclusions at all. Many, probably the great majority, are never accepted by reputable magazines and simply have to be aired in poetry groups and then filed for attention years later.

There are nonetheless strategies to make best use of your time. The stages below do not need to be followed mechanically, and there are poems that spring almost perfect from first putting pen to paper. But first blooms are rarities, and may be no better than the products of prolonged toil, in which art has concealed art. You need to develop your own working methods.

1. First comes a theme, which may be anything from a few words to a fleshed-out plan. Belonging to this stage are jottings, detailed notes, references to poems similar in shape or content. Also a long, hard look at the chances of success. Poets are not paid on an hourly basis, so that time lavished on one thing is time stolen from something else.

2. First draft. Here the poem takes shape. Content will be worked out: what the poem says and how. Verse type, rhyme scheme and stanza patterning will have been decided, and in overall shape the poem is looking like its final version.

3. Crafting. Now the draft is taken apart. Commercial writing omits this stage because there isn't the time, and such writing is anyway constructed in various stereotypes and phraseologies. Poetry is written with the deepest attention to language, however, and each shift in imagery, metaphor, verse style, word choice brings changes throughout the poem.

4. Evaluation. Stages 1 - 3 above, which are commonly repeated, produce what has now to be critiqued. The poem is analysed from various viewpoints — New Critical, Freudian / Jungian, mythological, stylistic, rhetorical, metaphorical, Postmodernist traits, and so forth. Some of these methods are evaluative; others simply reveal the poem's depth, understanding and interest. Objectivity is important, and ideally the critiques should be carried out with the help of sympathetic but astute critics in workshops and poetry circles.

5. Polishing. The poem, together with its originating notes and comments, is now put away, generally for some weeks or months. It is then read with fresh eyes, and anything less than excellent is immediately marked for attention. Changes and improvements are made, and the piece again put away for rereading later. When this process no longer brings changes, the piece is ready for publication. Note the time element: most poets find it very unwise to make significant changes immediately before publication.

6. Submitting for publication. Many poems are first printed in small magazines, which helps generate interest and reputation. The appropriate magazines need to be selected very carefully, and their guides for submission adhered to.

7. Publicizing. Most poetry gets known through networking, attending poetry groups and readings, serving on committees, writing reviews, helping to edit anthologies, etc. Publicizing your work is an essential but commonly overlooked aspect of the poetry writing business.

On the Turning Away

2004-11-11T23:42:00.000-06:00

Homecoming

i took a separate path of return
to here, to now, to you,
through bullets and barbed-wire

medals on my chest

exchanging blood for freedom.

i know you would do the same
for me, and more - as you daily
offer your life on that battlefield
of sand.

~~

Our old house is empty now
save dusty portraits in cracking
frames; young smiles upon our
lips, were we ever really that age?

Sheets cover furniture, hiding
coffee stains and cigarette burns
and rank memories of after school
parties when each of us lost our
virginity on that couch.

No one came back to claim any
unvaluables - what price memories?

~~

Memories change too with time.
We are not like that anymore;
fearlessness spent, immortality
vanquished-

Shell-shocked ghosts of ourselves.

After sleeping in foxholes,
bus stations, alleys, desert sands,
after all these years and miles
with battles lost or won

Strangers become brothers.
Our hearts are the only family
we can truly call, home.
________________________________+++

i left the military in 1993 after the first Gulf War.
A friend of mine, Kirk joined the military and has
made a career of it. After 13 years of mostly over-seas
assignments, including the past two years in Iraq, he
and his family have finally been stationed in Georgia
at Fort McPherson. i look forward to seeing him this
Christmas. The poem above is in tribute to him.
Thanks Kirk. You are still able to inspire after all these
years.

Literary Gaming

2004-11-11T16:36:00.000-06:00

Остранение. That's what some say it is: making strange. Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game — a seemingly curious concept — is not truly oxymoronic. It may be that certain literary games, including works of interactive fiction, derive their power from the play between their literary aspects and their nature as games (Montfort and Moulthrop 2003). Whether or not such arguments are persuasive, in some ways literature and game do seem to toe the same line.

Literary gaming actually is far from meaningless — it means several things. One is the metaphorical game played by the author of a literary work with the reader, a figure that can help us understand why the author writes particular things, what the reader may think in response, and how the text has anticipated the "moves" or "play" of the reader. A wonderful investigation of this sort of literary game is found in Playtexts (Motte 1995), which considers many playful works of literature, including Pale Fire and Nadja. This article features more literal games, however, so we had best turn to those that structure the interactions of participants through explicit rules.

Numerous common games are deeply based on the structures and strictures of language. Crossword puzzles call on the puzzle-solver to think of a word that satisfies some interlocking lexical constraints and the provided definition. (Novelist George Perec is one literary figure who also constructed devious crosswords.) It seems a bit strange to call such puzzles "games," since a single person engages with the puzzle — an ordinary situation in computer gaming today, but hardly the archetypical gaming situation. However, there are also multi-player games that use a crossword format, including Scrabble, Upwords, et cetera. The host of letter-based games also includes word searches and jumbles; there are even games that can be played verbally, such as one that involves adding letters to form a prefix while trying to avoid forming a whole word; it is variously known as ghost or prefi. Along different lines, dictionary (commercialized as Balderdash) is a bluffing game in which players define obscure words and try to persuade others that their definition is correct. These games may resonate in certain ways and may tease apart things about language, but perhaps these aspects, and the involvement of letters and words, do not suffice to make them truly literary. Consider, then, that some games can actually produce literature.

Several literature-producing games were developed and played by the Surrealists, who were inspired by parlor games and nonsense literature but had their own agenda of freeing the mind from the structures of rationality by means of strange and ludic structures (Brotchie 1993). Their games include question and answer, in which one player writes a question and another (without looking at the question) writes an answer; the resulting text is then read. The famous exquisite corpse requires each player to blindly write certain different parts of speech in turn — for instance: article and adjective; noun; transitive verb; article and adjective; noun. Legend has it that the first sentence produced by this method was le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.

In 1953, comedy writers Roger Price and Leonard Stern invented a similar sort of game in which one person's text, written with certain words omitted, could be completed by another person who filled in a form, providing certain parts of speech. The duo did not publish this game, Mad Libs, until 1958. Stern explained their conundrum, which will be familiar to electronic writers and artists working in new media: "[The first publisher ] didn't think it was a book, but honestly believed it might appeal to a game manufacturer. The game manufacturer in turn thought it was a book and sent us to another book publisher, who didn't think it was a book!" (Stern 2001) In honor of this paper-based literature-producing game and its Surrealist ancestors, Rachel Stevens cooked up a bagatelle: Fields of Dream.

While the writing of palindromes, acrostics, and the like is often dismissed as a game, it makes no more sense to define these as games than it does to say that the writing of sonnets and five-paragraph essays is a game. Which is not to say that it makes no sense at all; we would simply be waxing metaphorical and should not expect that everything we know about real games will apply. There is no way within the usual "game" of this kind to evaluate, for instance, how someone might win, lose, or advance, although such a feature is commonly found in many scholars' definitions of "game" (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). We still might find that the rules of such compositions, or similar rules, can play an interesting role in games, however.

If we need more assurance that the literary game is not a chimera, we can look to a similar category, the dramatic game (Boal 1992). Just as literature can participate with the structures of a game in an experience, just as there are games that result in literature, Augusto Boal has shown that "play" in the dramatic sense can coincide with the playing of a game. His "Theater of the Oppressed" provides a structure of rules whereby people in a community, participating as "spect-actors," can engage with actors to attempt to physically enact responses to oppression — to rehearse for the revolution, as Boal puts it. Since the dramatic game is not trivial, despite being a strange-sounding combination, we should hardly expect literary games to be restricted to silliness and trivialities.

Drawing on the tradition of computer and video games in various ways, provides a more certain proof that the literary game can do the serious, hard work of both literature and gaming, and suggest several ways in which different aspects of a literary game can function effectively together. Arteroids, by Jim Andrews, is a game, a kinetic poem, and a piece of creative software in the vein of MacPaint and Music Construction Kit. It is a way of playing (playing freely, not just playing a particular game) and allows the one at play to make art with moving images and words. Arteroids is not just a different-looking clone of the epunymous video game Asteroids. There are essential differences: in the physics of that world; in the way that large asteroids no longer break into medium-sized ones which break into smaller ones, all the while retaining their lethal power; and in the absence of the occasional flying saucer. Arteroids pilots a different course that involves more color and language and a different sort of trance-like challenge, perhaps more akin to a two-dimensional Rez than to the early arcade games that kept one's nerves constantly on edge. Even choosing where and whether to destory certain phrases is a creative activity, but in "play mode" one also is allowed to type new words that are then hurled through space. Andrews offers his game and information about it in Portuguese translation; Bookchin's game, discussed next, is available in French translation. Other literary game creators and electronic writers would do well to take a page from these two, even though translation is more difficult for games that use forms of natural language understanding or that rely on the structures of a language for their rules.

The Intruder, by Natalie Bookchin, is based on a very short story by Jorge Luis Borges in which two brothers fall in love with the same woman, live with her for a while, sell her to a whorehouse, buy her back, and finally kill her (Borges 1970). Bookchin's work is "a tale told in ten games," each with novel skins that do at least three things: visually refer to objects, incidents, conflicts, and themes in the story; incorporate text from the story; and refer to various retro computer games with their gameplay and appearance. Most of the games have the same forms as Pong, Kaboom, Laser Blast, Outlaw, and Jungle Hunt; the sixth is interesting to compare to Gal's Panic, an arcade game that displayed a nude woman as a reward for completing a level. The skins and structures of the game communicate in intriguing ways. Bookchin's piece, like the antifable that Borges wrote, is both diverting and disturbing. It suggests that games can be made to work in complex, artful, perhaps even literary ways — Borges can write an antifable, thus Bookchin can write an antigame; the antifable can make us question aspects of our society and even the form of the fable itself ... the antigame, similarly. While The Intruder clearly derides the stereotypical structures of the video game, it also suggests that the literary game can do better than this, just as "La Intrusa" reveals how literature can exceed the banal anecdote.

Nine, by Jason E. Lewis, takes the format of the nine-square, eight-tile sliding puzzle as its most evident interface. This game is familiar to many as a physical puzzle and also familiar to all but the latest Macintosh users as the canonical built-in game, the solitaire of that platform. As the user/reader/puzzler slides the tiles about, short texts are presented in the spaces left behind, narrating Lewis's birth and upbringing. Interestingly, although the texts appear in different places and alongside different images, they appear in the same sequence, no matter how one shifts the tiles around. As some manipulations will reveal, sliding the squares into the empty space is not the only way to change the image; shifting a square does something other than simply translating the image in space. Although it seems to invite us to puzzle pieces of an imagine together, this surface puzzle ends up not being the real one — it is solved to begin with, seen a certain way. It exists mainly to invite us to turn our thinking in literary and artistic ways, joining the texts we read to our own experiences, reading about the connections between the author and his hypothetical double, affiliating images with words.

Bad Machine, by Dan Shiovitz, is an exquisite and involved work of interactive fiction. Bad Machine not only allows users to type things in; this program actually has the ability to understand commands and to simulate action. Language becomes not just a rock to be blown away with a keystroke or a ball to hit with a paddle, but the very means of guiding your "ship," a character, within a world that is textually described. A quick perusal of Bad Machine is unlikely to be enjoyable or intelligible. Player/readers should plan to spend at least thirty minutes with the game to begin to understand what is going on; roughly speaking, it is more like a novel or long poem than like a sonnet or piece of visual art. On its surface, the texts that Bad Machine displays share some features with the writings of Talan Memmott, Alan Sondheim, Mez, Kenji Siratori, and JODI. But this game is also a rich simulation that can generate different narratives depending upon how the player instructs the main "character" — a curious sort of machine protagonist, in this case — through a world that has been made strange. The way in which the world must be figured out draws on scientific traditions and on ways of thinking that someone solving a literary riddle might use. Shiovitz, in crafting Bad Machine, chose not to sacrifice or convert any of interactive fiction's "game-nature" in building an artful world.

EPIPHANY

2004-11-11T15:14:00.000-06:00

EPIPHANY

Combat troops
Viet Nam.
The day of my birth
heralded Epiphany 1968.
i remember then,
as i do now my
Buddhist brothers
flaming themselves
on the altars of
freedom -ultimate nirvana.

(ii.)

Cars pass over the blacktop
that once knew my ancestors
footprints.
The Souix, Sauk-Fox, Blackfoot:
great warriors, men of strong-medicine;
women of Great WhiteBuffalo Spirit.
Ghost & SunDancers creating legends for themselves-
Becoming the myths of children's stories, forgotten.

(iii.)

i knew the trees, the plains,
the rivers, the stars;
all their citizens
moved in common alacrity-

never captured by Ansel Adams.

Night hawks & morning doves
tribal wolves & communal lambs
co-habited in moonlit fields
when natural thunder,
not the sound of war
rumbled throughthe prairies.

(iv.)

Life was not as complicated-
Just Walter Cronkite reporting
the evening news.
Until i was born in 1968,
Then the world learned the blues.

General Nuisance Declares Victory

2004-11-11T02:00:00.000-06:00

General Nuisance Declares Victory
A post-war poem of the Iraq War

Let us wallow in triumph and glory
for our great army has vanquished
in weeks an enemy armed to the teeth
with automatic weapons and grenades.
Hand out the medals!

Hundreds of billions of dollars have held
legitimate sway
over swarthy desperadoes.
Let us give thanks to God
for only a few thousand of the innocent
happened accidentally (and regrettably) to die
for the Good Cause of democracy
and only a few thousand more
chose to be degraded to a pulp of flesh and uniform--
many of them probably volunteers.
We know the people’s gratitude will flower
as it has around the world
when our freedoms have been forcibly exported.

We are humble in victory
for we know the American taxpayer
can not bear too high a price
and since the wealthy are the engines of economic progress
we have only the pennies of the less-well-off to play with,
but we generously pledge at least a million --
perhaps as much as three
to raise your poor benighted land and people
(poor, in spite of the humanitarian
eyelet we charitably punctured in our sanctions)
we shall line your ancient streets with fast food outlets
where once were only gossipy old cafés;
our mighty world-competing industries
will be chosen to construct new oil production plants
the likes of which will make all gasp in awe
their black milk will flow and all our auto industries will thrive
to the benefit of every human nation.

Finally we’d like to thank our media
for their restraint and taste
in not intruding in the grief of those few thousand families
by parading gory death or mutilated children
before our patriotic public.
And to those unpatriotic naysayers,
who raise the question of
who put the tyrant there,I say - the tyrant's gone and
look we won!

Peace Sells but who's buying?

2004-11-11T01:18:00.000-06:00

Who by Fire

Tank tracks
Gouge muddied channels
Our homes and schools
Laced with mortar bombardment
Such pretty lace
Grandmother's white laceWet lace
Her sons and grandchildren,
All outlived and buried
In mud, somewhere
And she
Media fodder
Primetime tears
For one military complex or another

Soldiers are smeared in the mud
By the tongues of politicians
Presidents, jutting and resolute
Girded with popular patriotism
Denounce terrorism
Up to their genitals in blood
But their hands are clean,
And they are far away
Attending the Peace Process -
So who can we blame,
But those less mired than ourselves -
Who, but the Enemy?

Yes, there are war criminals in every field and bar
A corpse beneath each muddy turned potato
Animals bereft, perplexed and wandering
Cows left achingly unmilked
But we lean to hear the tinny transistor words
Of world leaders
Drowned out by bombers' drones
The peacemakers cut our land in small squares
Those gore-drenched ghouls

Shake protocol-polite clean hands
At lengthy polished tables
And we, condemned to repeat history
In spiraling murderous circles
The well is full of the dead
Where, then, do we wash our hands?
In whose blood, but the Enemy?

Poetic Silence

2004-11-11T00:20:00.000-06:00

Be Still

There are times when all the writing exercises, inspirational ideas, writer's workshops, artistic films, and whatnot will simply not help us to examine the events of our lives and then write about those. Sometimes the mind is too overwhelmed. The emotions are too strong. The distractions too great. And so what is there that we could possibly do to try and get a handle on things? Nothing. No, no, i don't mean that cynically at all!! I literally mean for you to try and do nothing. Instead, just be still.

It's not as easy as it sounds. i'm not talking about "doing nothing" as is watching tv or listening to the radio. i'm not talking about meeting friends to sit around and talk or drink or hang out at the park. i'm not talking about "doing nothing" while doing dishes or laundry. i'm seriously talking about finding a place to sit where you will not be interupted -- or wherever there is the least likely chance that you'll be interupted. Sitting down, on the floor or on a mat, closing your eyes -- and staying awake -- in silence for as long as you possibly can.

Yeah, it's basically meditation.

But it can be so much more. One thing that i find very difficult to do while meditating is to quiet my mind from its calculations of the bank book or from mentally creating a to do list. So i usually try to picture a very nice bookshelf just outside the room in which i am sitting. And as things pop into my mind, i imagine myself putting that "thing" on the shelf outside the room. The shelf is covered and protected, so no one can get to my stuff. It will all be there when i'm done doing nothing. And i can pick up as much of it as i want when i'm done. But for now, just for the time while i'm "being still", i imagine that i leave the pen & paper of my to-do list on the shelf. i leave the calculator and checkbook ledger on the shelf. And even if a person comes up, i put them out on the shelf! For instance, if i think of my dad and how i really need to call him. i imagine the phone on the shelf with a post-it on it that says, "Call dad." Or if I think of a person i need to talk to in person, then i imagine them sitting very comfortably on one of the shelves. It can all wait.
After everything is safe and sound out on the shelf, i come back to me. Sitting. Alone. Silent. And what is there? Just me. I usually do some things in my mind to get and stay comfortable. I make sure I'm sitting up so i don't fall asleep. I feel the floor solidly beneath me and let it hold me instead of me trying to hold me. I relax into the solid arms of the floor. And then i just sit.
What is most interesting to me about these moments -- when i can manage to actually give myself the gift of them -- is that this is precisely when my creativity returns to me.

Sometimes, like just the other day, a shape will come to mind. The other day an almond shape came to mind. It was more pointed at both ends though. Then it squished itself in the middle and looked like an infinity sign with points. Then the ends flattened, and it turned up and looked like an hour glass. Then the hour glass turned back on its side and became the outline for the direction in which the bottom of a lotus flower goes -- petals up into the sun, roots down into the water. And the shape kept going through those movements over and over, like a little cartoon.
I stayed with the movement for as long as i could (till my butt was asleep and doing that weird pinchy thing that happens when a foot falls asleep, you know?). I shifted my position a little to get the blood flowing again, and then i considered the shape and its movements again. What did it mean to me? How did it make me feel?

Well, it was a comforting movement. It made me feel calm. And i started to think about it as a symbol for movement, moving the energy in my life. The past few weeks had been sluggish and discouraging. I took this little symbol to me that i could just keep moving creatively and let the sluggish and discouraging stuff (and people) go. I would just cycle through my movements past all that. And for whatever reason, it helped me to want to write again. I wanted to write down and draw what i had seen.

For some people a symbol will pop up. For others a word or two. Maybe a whole line of poetry. Maybe they will picture a scene from someplace they've never been in real life. Maybe they'll meet someone in that imaginary place who will have a gift for them. And then maybe that gift will hold meaning. Whatever it is that comes up for you, remember is is your safe space. Even if something emotional comes up, this is not a space where anything can hurt you. You are safe here. And maybe this is just a chance to look at that emotion or event and garner something from it for you to use back in your everyday life.

Being as this is a Poetry blog, i would like to suggest that after you have had time to be still, you might try to pick up that pen and paper again. Not to make a to-do list, but rather to record whatever came up for you in your quiet time. Or to just jot down the word or shape that came up. You never know where these notes might lead on your creative path. You don't necessarily have to do anything with the notes just yet -- unless you are moved to do something right away. Just hang on to the notes. Go back later to revisit them and maybe use them as spring-board to creating poems. But for now, just find and make the time to be still.

Press Release: Plath's ARIEL to be read

2004-11-10T15:23:00.000-06:00

Historic Reading of Sylvia Plath's Ariel Featuring Her daughter, Frieda Hughes
For the first time in America, the manuscript of Ariel that Sylvia Plath left behind when she died in 1963 will be read publicly from beginning to end. Co-presented by the Academy of American Poets, Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center CUNY, HarperCollins and the Poetry Society of America, the reading will take place on Tuesday, 30th November 2004, at 7:30pm, in Proshansky Auditorium, New York City.

Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, will introduce a stellar roster of poets and critics who will read, including Frank Bidart, Jorie Graham, Kimiko Hahn, Richard Howard, Katha Pollitt and Helen Vendler.

The reading will celebrate the publication of Ariel: The Restored Edition (HarperCollins, 9th November 2004), which publishes the poems according to Plath's original selection and arrangement. The Ariel that was published in Britain in 1965 and in America in 1966 was arranged by Plath's late husband, the poet Ted Hughes.

"My mother had described her Ariel manuscript as beginning with the word 'Love' and ending with the word 'Spring,' and it was clearly geared to cover the ground from just before the breakup of the marriage to the resolution of a new life, with all the agonies and furies in between," Hughes writes in her foreword to the new edition of her mother's most acclaimed collection.

Readers of Plath will be able to hear for the first time the exact sequence and movement of the Ariel poems, including not only the well-known "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" but also the twelve poems that have been restored such as "Thalidomide," "Barren Woman" and "Amnesiac." Witness the incredible legacy of a poet described by John Updike as "a young woman who... rose from the dead to become, in ten driven years, the best, the most exciting and influential, the most ruthlessly original poet of her generation."

Tickets are available at the door the evening of the reading. General Admission is $10, $7 for members of the Academy of American Poets and Poetry Society of America and $5 for students.
The venue is: Proshansky Auditorium, Concourse Level, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Avenue (between 34th and 35th streets), New York.

Ligature: An Online Journal of the Arts

2004-11-10T15:18:00.000-06:00

Ligature: An Online Journal of the Arts

Calling All PoetsLigature is looking for submissions.
click to find out more, and how you can possibly get published in the forthcoming on-line issue.

notes from poetry class

2004-11-10T14:30:00.000-06:00

Imagism

Name given to a movement in poetry, originating in 1912 and
represented by Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, and others, aiming at clarity
of expression through the use of precise visual images. In the early
period often written in the French form Imagisme.

IMAGIST, A group of American and English poets whose poetic
program was formulated about 1912 by Ezra Pound--in conjunction with fellow poets Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Richard Aldington, and F.S. Flint--and was inspired by the critical views of T.E. Hulme, in revolt against the careless thinking and Romantic optimism he saw prevailing. The Imagists wrote succinct verse of dry clarity and hard outline in
which an exact visual image made a total poetic statement. Imagism was
a successor to the French Symbolist movement, but, whereas
Symbolism had an affinity with music, Imagism sought analogy with
sculpture. In 1914 Pound turned to Vorticism, and Amy Lowell largely
took over leadership of the group.
Among others who wrote Imagist
poetry were John Gould Fletcher and Harriet Monroe;
and Conrad Aiken,
Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens,
D.H. Lawrence, and T.S. Eliot were

influenced by it in their own poetry.

The four Imagist anthologies (Des Imagistes, 1914; Some Imagists, 1915, 1916, 1917), and the magazines Poetry (from 1912) and The Egoist (from 1914), in the United States and England, respectively, published the work of a dozen Imagist poets.

From an Imagist manifesto:

1. To use the language of common speech, but to employ the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word.

2. We believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.

3. Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk the real difficulties of his art.

5. To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred norindefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of the very essence of poetry.

Wayne's Words:

2004-11-10T02:18:00.000-06:00

My Beach-head

Ode to the wind

Eternity could very well
only an ocean be,
or stallion bolting free
or more, the sad violin
of some mendicant cricket
on my porch.

As for the solitary prisoner
who forsakes his iron chains
the wind reveals stranger things...

Unstopping his ears
Scaling his eyes.

Today, i escaped my captive cell
went wandering along my old
beach-head and listened for
a chanting in the waves but oddly
beheld a horse charging past
and heard once more a
cricket play his feint violin -

A gust of wind blew akin to a friend

whispering:

Eternity may very well
only an ocean be,
or a stallion bolting free
or more the lost violin
of some cricket on the sand.

Albert Gelpi on postmodern poetry

2004-11-10T00:10:00.000-06:00

Albert Gelpi on postmodern poetry

If you have the time and the stomach for it the link above will give you a good understanding of our topic from earlier: post modernist poetry. Pack a lunch!

How - To Make a Dadaist Poem

2004-11-10T00:01:00.000-06:00

Anyone who has ever played with those magnetic poetry kits knows a little about dadaist poetry. Or if you scroll down the links to past post and click on Simply e-musing -Which Dean highly recommends- you also will get a creative taste of dada. Or just click the link here to find out another method. Oh, and have some scissors handy!

"And here are you a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar."

----Tristan Tzara

Poetry as consciousness raising tool

2004-11-09T23:25:00.000-06:00

Life Behind the Lines
The poetry of Zakariah Mohammed, one of the leading Palestinian poets of his generation, has been described as language which "echoes the real pulse and rhythms of contemporary Arab life".

Mohammed's hometown is Ramallah in the West Bank - although he lived as an exile in Beirut, Tunis and Amman before returning to the Palestinian territories in 1996. His poetry captures the spirit of life under Israeli occupation. Indeed, his recent poems, such as War (below), have charted the deterioration in Israeli-Palestinian relations that led up to the intifada.

He has used his columns in the Arab press to criticise suicide bombings and terrorist attacks, recently writing: "I stand against killing civilians and against suicide. But now I am afraid the softer, quieter people will say, if they want all-out war then let us have all-out war." He is also deeply concerned about the destruction of Palestinian culture, which began before the latest Israeli offensive. He commented that "before the Oslo agreement there was no cinema in Ramallah. After there was a theatre and some cinemas. Now they are just destroying what we had built following the Oslo agreement - they just stormed the cinemas, theatres and the publishing house."

The Sakakini cultural centre, used by writers, painters and poets, was ransacked during one particularly violent incursion. "It was one of the finest places in Ramallah" Mohammed said. "They [the Israelis] damaged paintings and robbed money. Many, many buildings have been stormed. They entered everywhere. Every closed building has been blown up. It is like a tornado has ripped through, leaving everything in a mess."

Mohammed and his friends and family have suffered a great deal in recent months. His wife and children have been sleeping fully clothed, ready for the front door to come crashing in. They keep away from the windows of their flat above the abandoned Red Cross headquarters for fear of being shot.

The devastation in Ramallah was far worse than anything in Beirut, according to Mohammed. One day, perhaps, he will use the destruction around his Ramallah home as inspiration - but his main concern at the moment is that voices of moderation are heard above the clamour for revenge. Raising the consciousness of all who read his words; Mohammed is an exemplar of what the nobilty of a poet can achieve amid the banality of the masses.

War
by Zakaria Mohammed

War is on the horizon,

you can bet on it Trouble is brewing

I shepherd my nightmares

herd them like clouds

Under cover of darkness

the message gets through -

rumours of divers and planes

metal fish and artillery

I shore up my fort which crumbles

in front of me

We are heading for trouble over stones,

thorns and waste land Only the implacable sun
knows how long and how violent

knows exactly how cruel our war will be

Only the sun can tell how the flares

of its flames scorch the edge of the galaxy