A POEM BY ROBINSON JEFFFERS--THE SOUL'S DESERT

emergence by tj worthington (30"x30")

THE SOUL'S DESERT

(written August 30, 1939)


They are warming up the old horrors; and all that they

        say is echoes of echoes.

Beware of taking sides; only watch.

These are not criminals, nor hucksters and little jour-

        nalists, but the governments

Of the great nations; men favorably

Representative of massed humanity. Observe them.

        Wrath and laughter

Are quite irrelevant. Clearly it is time

To become disillusioned, each person to enter his own

        soul's desert

And look for God---having seen man.


                                 --Robinson Jeffers 
                                               American (1887-1962)

photo by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH POETRY

jan van munster

Two years of reading difficult writing for an average high school graduate was my preparation for college. Out of the Navy, into school, I liked the English class the best, introducing poetry that was awfully interesting to a kid with no experience in poetry but Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Turns out, I'd recommend them for introductions. They speak in our language. I found a paperback of Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems in the first week of school. Back in my one-room attic apartment, after homework, I thought I'd read a few of the poems before sleep. No sleep happened. I could not stop reading, read them all and read them all again and again. All night long I lay in the bed, head propped on pillow, reading his poems. They spoke to me. I was in awe of what he was doing with the form. My knowledge of poetry was negligible beyond a few of the Beats. Jeffers was like the next step. I have beside me a small Modern Library, 1935 edition, of The Roan Stallion, Tamar And Other Poems, by Jeffers. Probably found it someplace for fifty cents. Just now read one of his poems selected randomly, Pelicans. Reading just one of his poems after not reading him in a very long time, I see the original attraction to his writing. I like the connections he makes and what he sees in what he's looking at. Thus began a lifetime affection for poetry. 

jan van munster

Several years of reading Twentieth Century American poetry, and poetry from Europe and Asia, I came to a place that when I want to read a poem or a few, I go to an anthology of Chinese poetry, Sunflower Splendor, from beginning to 1975, the date of publication, several translators.  This is my desert island book. Chinese poetry satisfies me like no other. My favorites were written over a millennium ago. Tu Fu lived from 712-770. Han Yu lived from 768 to 824. Han Yu wrote a long poem I've read many times, Southern Mountains. These are the mountains of southern China, semi-tropical. I'd like to show you the whole poem, though will pick a few lines:

          Winter comes with somber silence,

           Ice and snow sculpting in white jade.

           A new sun lights the summits

           Stretching heights and breadths millions of feet.

I've loved this anthology so much, I bought the hardback edition first, then the paperback edition, to save the hardback for later years and wear out the paperback along the way. 

jan van munster

Sunflower Splendor is such a treasure, I needed a shelf copy and a copy for use. I have four copies of the Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao Te Ching, different editions. Favorite is the one illustrated with ancient Chinese paintings. And there is John Berryman's book of poems, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, 1968, I keep near at hand. Sometimes I want to read a Berryman poem, pick it up, read one, savor it and go on. And from that same time, I recall devouring Robert Lowell's book of poems, Notebook 1967-68. It was in the same time as Norman Mailer's Armies Of The Night and Robert Bly's long poem, The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last, a poem of the American war in Vietnam. I'd heard Bly read it in person, bought a cassette tape of him reading it. Have read it again recently in his new and selected poems, Stealing Sugar From The Castle, released last year. Bly is another of the poets I pick up and read one or two and put it down. I read Bly an awful lot in the late Sixties, early Seventies. Haven't read him much at all since around 1980. Found his selected poems published, and like his later poems quite a lot better than the earlier poems. Not throwing off on the early ones, like Light Around The Body, not at all, but saying he's gone beyond in his maturity. 

jan van munster

I've picked up Louise Gluck's book of collected poems, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck I've followed since her first book of poems, Firstborn. I was glad to see her poems together in one volume. It's so thick, it's kind of intimidating, so much to pick from. I don't like to read poetry books front to back, unless it would be Lowell's, Notebook 67-68. I wanted to touch Louise Gluck's book to pick it up and open it. I let it fall open randomly and read the poem it opened to, Lullaby, p 299, from her book, The Wild Iris, a poem called Lullaby. I want to share three of the lines with you:

Twilight, then early evening. Fireflies

in the room, flickering here and there, here and there,

and summer's deep sweetness filling the open window. 

Reading the entire poem took my breath away. Her poems frequently take hold of me in such a way I inhale and exhale when it is finished, thinking, Where did that come from? It is the same feeling when I stand in front of Robert Motherwell's Elegy To The Spanish Republic, or Monet's water lilies. The kind of thing that makes me say to self, This is the real deal, this is art. I'm recalling a show I saw of Jaap Mooy's drawings by felt-tip black marker, every one of them an astonishment, black squiggles on white. Couldn't stop staring them, had to buy a copy of the paperback book of the show in the gift shop. Gluck's poems do for me what Jaap Mooy's simple drawings did, each one awe inspiring. 

jan van munster himself

*

A POEM BY WENDY SALINGER

COASTAL CAROLINA FAIR 
                        WITH GAY BOYS


Those who never forget how to play:

which are they?

Oh

they know

how

to look lovely.

Prescient as women, they see

the image in another's eye.


Who keep alive

in waists and lowered looks

for me the older motion of a boy

who too disdained me in his most pure moment.

The shadow of his nose lay on his cheek

cast iron in the moon. 

In his unsettled voice the wind

took place.


Who mount the constellations of machines--

                                          the electric swing,

its cupola whipped and scrolled like bridal cake--

out and out and over the tents

of Jolly Dolly and Electric Man

and Girl Alive who Has No Bones

until World's Smallest Family dwarfs to ants,

far over the Four-Winged-Duck, monstrous in flight;


each strapped in his bucket tight about the groin

and by a silver chain hanging on.


                                  ---Wendy Salinger
                                       from her book of poems
                                      Folly River, 1980

*

A POEM BY WALLACE STEVENS

bird in space

constantin brancusi

               OF MERE BEING


          The palm at the end of the mind,

          Beyond the last thought, rises

          In the bronze decor,


          A gold-feathered bird

          Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

          Without human feeling, a foreign song.


          You know then that it is not the reason

          That makes us happy or unhappy.

          The bird sings. Its feathers shine.


          The palm stands on the edge of space.

          The wind moves slowly in the branches.

          The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle 
                                                              down. 


                                        ---Wallace Stevens
                                            1879-1955

blue feather

alexander calder

*

A POEM BY TOM CLARK

                    HUSH, HUSH


               I know these radio waves

               are being stored away

               in my brain somewhere

               even tho I'm not here

               to pay any attention 
                              to them


               They'll come back later as

               frequency-modulated

               variety shows and UHF cabaret


               This is what I was thinking, Ted

        
               For instance, while I was 
                           writing this
               the following music
                    came into my head:


               Overture to Sonata for Trumpet &
                                                          Strings
                             by Henry Purcell

               Miles Davis: Ssh . . . Peaceful

               Jimmy Reed: Hush, Hush


                                      - - - Tom Clark 

*

HANK BRODT HONORABLE MAN

 

 

display inside the library doorway

I struggled inside self all day yesterday in a minor way. It takes a lot to make me turn the key in the car's ignition. Necessity only. Seven o'clock Monday evening at the library in Sparta a man talking of his experiences as a Polish Jew in his teens subject to the hatred of European Christians in the early 1940s. It was the ones identifying themselves Nazi actively, consciously terrorizing the Jews of Europe. The other Christians were complicit, not necessarily by aggressive action, but in the hatred. Europe still has some Jews, like North Carolina still has descendants of the Cherokee in the southwestern corner. Over a lifetime I've read quite a lot about the holocaust, have seen documentaries galore, read histories, memoirs, fiction, plays and poetry concerning the time. I've known a woman with the numbers tattooed on her arm and two men who were successful in their attempts to stay out of sight of Nazis and collaborators. One dyed his hair blonde. In the late 1960s I saw Peter Weiss's play in New York, The Investigation. It was script from trials in a German court 1964-1965, of 21 people active in the Auschwitz camp, 1941-1945. It was surely the most powerful stage or film performance of my life. I don't think there was ever a laugh, the theater was full, and it was Broadway. It was long. It amounted to witness after witness telling their experience at the will of the accused. Mournful is what it was. I was so empathetic with the Jewish people in that time of my life, still am, I identified with them in a very, very, very minor way that was a hundred percent major in my own feelings. In my college years I knew a great many Jews from working in the bookstore. Jews read books. Intelligent conversations I valued. People I valued, always will. I am of the belief that it is important the stories of that time be told, generation after generation, as long as hate continues to wither the human heart.

 

hank brodt

 

I questioned going to hear the man talk unto the last moment. Picked up the keys twenty-five minutes to seven and went out the door, leaving it open for Caterpillar, who was enjoying the outdoor air, to go in as she wills. I like allowing my pets their own will, as long as it's not dangerous, like chasing cars, biting. I like my dog or cat not to be a replica of my mind, but itself as much as possible. I find allowing my pets to be themselves much more interesting for me and for them than requiring obedience. In like manner, I want to be allowed to live my life by my own decisions within the realm of my control by decision making. Personal autonomy is what I call it. I believe it is important as a birthright, human, animal, bird, fish, reptile, bug, tree. I value it for myself and value it for others. I cannot with conscience deny for someone else what I value for myself. I cannot believe other people for whom an empathetic feeling is not even a consideration. I have a hard time believing somebody can run a knife down the belly of a deer corpse hanging by its back legs and watch the guts fall out. In my heart the animals have exactly the same value as we super-egoic humans. This aspect of my nature is where my empathetic attitude toward Jews comes from. It's the same with the Indians. They call themselves Indians. Why would I want to call them Native Americans? They're insulted by that. Indian means the enemy. It's not insulting; it's the truth. I feel the same  toward the rabbit grazing by the side of the road. It starts, in my heart, with a belief I live by that all living beings are holy. I cannot believe people who claim alliance with a religion and a "belief" in God can be zealous about denying others a right to existence, by one's own individual will. When I say I can't believe them, I mean I never believe anything they say. They are liars living a lie. I see no truth in them. Herein is the core of why I have no use for religion. It's only good for its original purpose, power of the few over the many. Christendom gave itself to the dark side over Jews with zeal. Christians around the world didn't care what happened to the Jews same as they didn't care what happened in Rwanda. The photographs in LIFE magazine when I was in the 6th grade burnt tattoos into the child's brain. I still see them. I couldn't stop looking at them. I saw that each one of them had a life like I did, going along unconcerned, then a corpse on a pile because the Christians went nuts again.

 

hank brodt

 

I chose to drive to town to honor the man by listening to him. I wanted to hear his story. I've never heard anyone talk of his experiences in concentration camps. I've read, saw films, documentaries, but had never heard someone in person talk. Jews tend not to talk about Jewish matters with outsiders for an abundance of historical reasons, literally in the millions. He said that he spoke so those people whose lives had been destroyed by the worst among us would be remembered as valid and honorable persons in their autonomous selves. It took me back to being in the audience at Peter Weiss's play, seeing, hearing Hank Brodt tell in an hour his story it would take a lifetime to tell. He took me by association to a poem I looked up this morning by American poet, Anthony Hecht, from his book, The Hard Hours, the poem, "More Light! More Light!" The quotation marks are in the title. I'm sure it's easy to find online. It is the down and dirtiest, hardest to read of any poem in my limited experience. I can't even write out a brief few sentences to suggest what it's about. It's too horrid for me to repeat and I don't want to bring you down any more than I already have. It was the story of an atrocity, the kind that curls the toes, callouses the mind and bruises the heart. I'll put here the last verse. 

 

     No prayers or incense rose up in those hours

     Which grew to be years, and every day came mute

     Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,

     And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

 

 

hank brodt

 

This poem is as close as I have found in writing to the profound hopelessness and hatred as the Jewish people of Europe truly suffered. Hank Brodt is the name of the man talking at the library. I felt profound respect looking at him while he spoke of that time. The part that struck me deepest, I feel like, was speaking of the hatred received at every turn, only hatred, revulsion in other people's eyes. He didn't say it, but I was thinking, Christians. Even people who were friends before the furor. Only hate everywhere you turn. Not just you-piss-me-off hate, but murderous, I-want-to-see-you-dead and I could get away with killing you hate. I watched him as he talked, thinking, this is truly an honorable man. He survived the unspeakable, for no crime, and is able to speak it rationally. A woman I knew in Charleston with the numbers on her arm stayed home out of sight, never went anywhere. When her husband, a writer, Robert Marks, had visitors, she stayed in the kitchen and smoked cigarettes. I was thinking if Hank Brodt could let himself, he could drift into such a condition. It must be a constant mental effort to stay out of such a condition. I thought about asking at the end how it felt when you're taken up without recourse knowing there is no turning back. I didn't want to put him through it in his mind. I could have sat and had conversation with him for hours, but couldn't break through the crowd that piled in around him. My energy was gone and I was ready for bed. Parked here at the house, I opened the car door, sat sideways in the seat with feet on the ground, sat there and looked at the landscape across the road, the bright yellow asters in flower. Sat there and gazed without thought at the green bank without seeing it, like it was a stage background and nothing was happening on stage. I sat on the side of the seat feeling I could happily fall asleep sitting in the car's open doorway, take a little nap. It felt like my energy went away, all but that needed to make it to the house far enough inside to fall down on the bed. Slept straight through for ten hours. Woke ready to start a new day. Something way down deep within was stirred. I want now to reread Saul Bellow's Mr. Sammler's Planet, the story of a Polish Jew who survived the camps. A powerful, intelligent book. I took it off the shelf when I picked up Anthony Hecht's book this morning. A good time to reread Bellow and Hecht. Most often I get Hank Brodt's name mixed up in my mind with Max Brod, Kafka's biographer. I find it odd that Hank Brodt lived Kafka's The Trial and The Castle in everyday life. I can't help but wonder, wouldn't it have been better to die than to survive? I believe I'd rather be a ghost drifting out of a smokestack across the sky than the one standing on the ground seeing it. Or so I like to think, not having the decision to face.

 

asters

 

 

*

 

A POEM BY PHILIP LEVINE

 

barbie by andy warhol

 

 

 

 

     BARBIE & KEN, KEN & BARBIE


Ken has a big job at Castle Air Force Base,

where the work is challenging and the future

lies on the cutting room table, docile and clear

for Ken, who with scissors unwrinkles its face.


Ken drives to Paso Robles on the weekend

in a sports car that runs on needle bearings;

he takes the turns hard and as he does he sings

for up ahead is the ocean and the sand


and Barbie in a pink negligee, Barbie

waiting in her tall pink pumps, golf clubs ready.

The coast hills are greener than they used to be,

the ocean restless, only Ken is steady.


Soon they'll be together, brother and sister,

Barbie and Ken, sharing a toothbrush, sharing

a toilet, a tub, sharing the same old song

that freezes on their lips, sharing each other


for that breathless moment when the elders

bow to their credit card. Sundays would be hell

what with packing, parting, and the long haul

if brother and sister weren't such good soldiers.



                                ----Philip Levine

andy warhol by andy warhol

 

 

 

*

ROBERT BLY POETRY AND BANJO PICKIN

emilie brzezinski

I've been reading a fair amount of poetry the last several months. It started when I bought Louise Gluck's Collected Poems last year. It waits in a stack beside my reading / movie viewing chair beside my reading lamp, a floor lamp that is a half inch chrome pipe from floor to lamp and shade. I like a simple lamp. Louise Gluck inspired me to take John Berryman's, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, off the shelf to read a poem whenever the notion strikes. Bought a new book of poems by Bill Nixon, Brazen Throats, that concern Vietnam war. Then I brought down from the shelf Robert Lowell, then Robert Bly, May Swenson, Gregory Orr, Greg Kuzma and George Seferis, one at a time over a period of weeks. I went ahead and bought Robert Bly's new Selected Poems, Stealing Sugar From the Castle. These others I like an awful lot, but Bly satisfies what I want from a poem. That's not absolute. Like John Berryman's book, Love and Fame, takes my breath from first page to last. I feel in sync with Robert Bly's flow somehow. It's been at least twenty years, even more, since I've dipped into my poetry books. I read Bly in the past, in the decade of the 70s. I probably read more of him than any of the others of the post WW2 American poets. His book, Light Around The Body, satisfies me immensely. Bly wrote an anti-war poem of Vietnam called The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last. It is ten verses and eight pages. It's powerful. I heard Bly read it at a reading in 1975 or 76, College of Charleston. He read it powerfully, dramatically, loud without bombast, furious, making his statement on war in poetry. Poetry and pop songs that deal with politics die at the moment the political issue is over. Political poems date as quickly as fashions. I have a cassette tape of Bly reading Teeth-Mother. I played some of it for my old Regular Baptist preacher friend, Millard Pruitt, some time in the 1980s. He listened closely and said, "Who is that, Buck Shaw?" Shaw is a preacher in the county. I had to laugh inside. If Bly knew an old Appalachian preacher in the old way took hearing him read Teeth-Mother for an old-timey hillbilly preacher, Bly would love it. Giving it some thought, I imagine he'd be happy with the likeness. It fit. Bly was preaching, speaking dramatically with rhythmic emphases, the way the old-timers preached.

 

emilie brzezinski

 

Bly gets down and dirty in Teeth-Mother like the great anti-war song of the time by the Fugs, Kill For Peace. It went farther than any of the other anti-war songs of the time. Bly in Teeth-Mother does not tiptoe over modest sensibilities. He puts you in the fighter pilot's seat dropping napalm on a village. He puts you inside the grass hut when it explodes. He takes us on a flight roaring over jungle and rectangular fields driven by jet engines. The opening three lines:

 

 Massive engines lift beautifully from the deck.

 Wings appear over the trees, wings with eight hundred rivets.

 

 Engines burning a thousand gallons of gasoline a minute sweep over

          the huts with dirt floors.

 

 

This reading of the Teeth-Mother, half a century after the war that in Vietnam now is called the American War, the poem has not dated one minute. The war is historical by now, but Bly's poem has immediacy that brings it into the present moment, now, as we speak. I feel in the presence of important writing. After thumbing through the pages when the book arrived, stopping at short verses for brief previews, I went to The Teeth-Mother Naked At Last the first time sitting down with it. Read it three times so far. I love its rhythms. The words make their own rhythms. It has a good flow for reading aloud in a small auditorium, Bly a poet who draws a good-sized audience in the university world. He gives a good reading. Poets, who tend to be inward people, often don't like giving readings, and many are boring in the delivery. Bly holds the audience attention as a stage performer whose performance is talking, like a preacher. In the time I witnessed him reading he wore a big serape all the time. I took it for a stage prop, like musicians in bands have their stage shirts, that is in bands where they wear shirts. The serape gave color and pizzazz to his plain Minnesota protestant person. I don't know, but imagine he came up in Scandinavian Protestantism, in his case Norwegian. The preacher I grew up influenced by was Swedish from Minnesota. He was so hard core the Southern Baptist Association would not accept him though he tried every year to get in. He was zealous.

emilie brzezinski

Robert Bly's poems excite me in a way similar to how good lyrics in a pop song can excite me, like the Rolling Stones', Wild Horses or Brown Sugar, or like Jane's Addiction's Mountain Song and Pigs In Zen. Just now went to YouTube to hear Mountain Song. I'm remembering seeing the band in 1991 on their last tour, and what an ecstatic experience it was hearing them at concert volume, the guitars, the vocals. I've taken a moment to read about a dozen of Bly's poems picked randomly. In one way, his writing is natural with a smooth flow, and in another way, he goes into the subconscious dreamscape within using the "magical realism" of Latin American writers unto seeming obscurity. Example from a poem found opening the book randomly, The Sympathies of the Long Married:

          Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
          Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
          Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

He takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary, as does Henry Miller in his prose in a different way, his own way. The present moment is full of associations from the past, from our deepest feelings to our deepest mind that includes insights from the higher self. I feel like Bly's poems start as an attempt to reach the higher self, a line at a time, a step at a time, he finds his way and enters a new world of understanding that includes the soul's understanding. Having this review of a poet I admired almost half a century ago, I'm finding subconscious influence of what I've learned from Robert Bly is at work unconsciously in my own writing, in my thinking, same as I found reviewing Henry Miller's writing. I had no idea how much Miller influenced my thinking and writing. Miller helped me to pay attention to the people around me, to appreciate each person's unique place at the center of the universe. I suspect Bly acted as a guide for me in his approach to a poem, in his search for the higher self within, to include the dream as reality, the same as looking out the window, seeing a donkey switching its tail and grazing, even to appreciate that which I otherwise might not. Bly's poems can be a discouragement to a young poet in the same way the banjo picking by Fred Cockerham can make a young banjo hopeful say, I'll never be able to do that no matter how much I practice or how long I live. Bly, like Cockerham, makes it seem so simple even a beginner could do it. But when you pay close attention to what he's doing, it can be like listening to a high school senior's valedictory talk to a second grader, over the head and unimaginably complex. For some, it becomes a goal. For others, it can be discouraging, not allowing that Fred Cockerham was once a beginner, too, learning his first chords and figuring out how to hold the strings down to make them ring and not go thud.

emilie brzezinski

I'm thinking of young Cheyanne, just turned seven, holding her first banjo looking for how to make the chords she could remember with her left hand, striking the strings and they go thud. It didn't matter. It was the first time her fingers had touched tuned banjo strings. Just that it made a sound delighted her. Of course, the adult impulse is to say you have to hold the strings down tight to make them ring, you don't hit the strings like that, you do it like this, giving instruction: I know more than you do. I said to myself, This is the first time she's ever held it, leave her alone, let her teach herself; that's how it's really done. I let go of my ridiculous mind and joined Cheyanne in her delight that she made the banjo say something. Didn't matter what, just let it say whatever it had to say. I feel an impulse to play for her Alice Gerrard singing, I'm goin around this world, I'm a banjo pickin girl, goin around this world, baby mine. But I don't want her to hear advanced banjo pickin yet, don't want to discourage her before she starts. That's for later when she finds the music. I want her own fascination to be her guide. Holding it, making sound with it, brings her light to the surface and makes her glow. It seems a deep inner need like she knew the banjo from a lifetime past. I'm recalling a time my banjo pickin friend Jr Maxwell told a guy who came to him asking Jr to teach him bluegrass banjo. Jr said, "If you can't figure it out for yourself, you don't want to play." I'm not going to hold Cheyanne to that, or anything. Will only encourage, not push. In my own writing as art form, not holding "art form" as something lofty, but everyday life, I am following the way of the mountain musician. It's not about money. It's about fun, having fun. It's not called playing because it's work. It's about going with your own style, what works for you, because it's fun. It's about playing better all the time, steps at a time, reaching for the best you can make it every time. It's called playing by ear. The ear tells the fingers what to do. There comes a time in the mastery of making music that mind leaves altogether, leaves an open passageway between ear and fingers. That's when the music flows. Writing the daily blog is my own form of banjo pickin, setting the music in motion and flowing with it. The most fun I have in any day is the day's writing. It's play. I listen to the rhythm as I write, and even sometimes leave mind in the writing. My own personal search is for a balance between head and heart, in the writing as well as in the living, to honor the feminine as well as the masculine, allow them to dance. Thank you, Robert Bly, and thank you, Henry Miller, for pointing the way for me to follow my own path, not somebody else's.

emilie brzezinski

 

 

*

 

A POEM BY WALLACE STEVENS

neil jenney

 

 

 
THE POEM THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF A MOUNTAIN
 
 
There it was, word for word,
 
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
 
 
He breathed its oxygen,
 
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
 
 
It reminded him how he had needed
 
A place to go to in his own direction,
 
 
How he had recomposed the pines,
 
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among the clouds,
 
 
For the outlook that would be right,
 
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
 
 
The exact rock where his inexactnesses

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,


Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.


                              ---Wallace Stevens
 

neil jenney

 

 

*

 

WANDERERS: A POEM BY TJ WORTHINGTON

alex katz

          WANDERERS
 

There is an old pecan tree by my door.

Three grackles are standing in its dried branches.

One is chirping to a grackle in the oak nearby.

The three change positions stretching wings between limbs.

One probes its beak through ruffled neck feathers.

A yellow flicker flaps around the trunk

chased by a mockingbird. The grackles fly.

The flicker digs for ants. It flies.

The mockingbird stands a moment on some leaves.

Root-tips are cracking rocks below in silence.

                            ---TJ Worthington, 1972

 

 

 

*

A POEM BY LUCAS CARPENTER

philippe petit

 

 

 

     YOUNG MAN ON A UNICYCLE

He emerged from the glare of late afternoon sun,

first as a shimmer, then a black silhouette

resolving hypnotically into focus.

So then there's that moment

when the utterly unexpected

(thankfully shorn of danger)

takes even imagination by surprise

and demands something (you know not what)

from you, but the best I can do

(while saving this sudden circus vision

for stories somewhere else)

is a startled stare, reflexive smile,

and a shuffle dance step I made up.

Not taken aback he balanced before me,

tilting forward, backward, back and forth,

the wheel never making a full turn.

He raised his arms like an evangelical in ecstasy

before heading back down the road that takes us home.

                                               ---Lucas Carpenter

philippe petit

 

 

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READING THE POEMS OF LOUISE GLUCK

robert motherwell

Today I gave myself a rare treat, one I did not know was necessary until it happened. It's been so relentlessly cold the last few days and nights, I needed to be warm, relaxed and warm. My neighbors who are away right now have a house across the road. I needed some time to sit back with a book in a warm house and I wanted a hot bath. Put clothes in the washing machine and ran the bath water as hot as I could take it, filled the tub as high as it would go without overflowing when I sat down, remembering I displace more water now than in the past. I'd pre-heated the house, making it comfortable. The floor was warm enough to walk barefoot. It would not do to take a hot bath in a cold room with a cold floor. Today I was taking a time-out from the cold. I sat down in the tub and the water rose appreciably. Feet were glowing warm in a short time, blood circulation. Warm feet was the greatest blessing of all. It felt like sitting in a sauna, the heat even all over. Almost nodded off a few times. I wanted to stay in the water on and on, but it started cooling down after a good while. I was surprised at how well the tub held the water's heat. I started getting restless. Dried off, dressed and went to the living room, sat on a warm sofa and picked up the book I'd brought to spend some time in the warm with, Louise Gluck's, Poems 1962-2012. Gluck requires close attention, focus, from word to word. She's a tight, compact poet who uses every word deliberately. Maybe I read a dozen poems, each of them half a dozen times, reading them over and over until I felt the flow of the language and followed the progression freely. From one of several poems titled Matins:

 

                          are you like the hawthorn tree,

          always the same thing in the same place,

          or are you more the foxglove, inconsistent, first springing up

          a pink spike on the slope behind the daisies,

          and the next year, purple in the rose garden?

 

louise gluck

 

I lay back on the sofa reading, bare feet up enjoying the warm air, mind enjoying the verse of Louise Gluck. I bought her first book in the late 1960s, Firstborn. She was not what you'd call a Sixties poet. Pop culture was not her ambition. She received quite a lot of positive attention, a Young American Poet of the moment. I liked her concise style with language. A quarter century later I found another of her books, Ararat, which I loved. In one of the poems I read today she wrote of standing before a window speaking to her other self reflected in the glass. The poem was one part of self talking to the other part of self. Her poems are often addressed to the other known as you. Sometimes you is another person, loosely identified, and sometimes you is another part of herself, like the mirror image self. Bob Dylan uses the device of you for another person and another part of self. I've thought several Bob Dylan songs conversations with himself. Sometimes with Dylan and with Gluck, you is both other and self at once. Her poems have a presence for me, such that each one is like a painting. Each one is uniquely itself like abstractions by Robert Motherwell. The poems are intimately personal, subjective, without being confessional. I read the poems over and over, went from last line to first and through it again, each time feeling the relationship of the words with each other, seeing it new each time, sometimes slightly new and sometimes radically new. From first reading to last I am in search of the poem Louise Gluck wrote. In some ways, I'd say she'd be a very difficult poet to translate into another language. The clarity of her word usage would be sublime for a translator, but then you get into the subtle nuances and it kinda gets past word meanings.

 

robert motherwell

 

I spent two hours with maybe a dozen poems. I wasn't explicating them or trying to figure them out. I was reading them looking for their feeling, images, what she was saying. The academic way I learned to read poetry was a good education, but I don't read like that anymore. I like to read a poem as a work of art to be taken on sight like a painting on a wall in a show. I like to read it for the story it is. I like to read a poem with the same eye that I watch a movie. Gluck's stories are not ones with beginning, middle and end, nor are they dramas. They are quiet observation. Each poem is a smooth ride through her thinking process. I like the quiet her poems ease into my mind. The lines pull me through the poems not by drama, but by the progression in the poem, riding its rhythm. I feel like she has a fine feeling for rhythm. Her rhythm is walking rhythm. I even feel like her poems are brief Pinter plays. I'll put here a full poem to give an idea of how she writes a complete poem. This is not to say all her poems are shaped like this one. Some have long lines and short stanzas. The poem itself determines it's physical expression on the page.

 

          SCILLA, by Louise Gluck

 

          Not I, you idiot, not self, but we, we---waves

          of sky blue like

          a critique of heaven: why

          do you treasure your voice

          when to be one thing

          is to be next to nothing?

          Why do you look up? To hear

          an echo like the voice

          of god? You are all the same to us,

          solitary, standing above us, planning

          your silly lives: you go

          where you are sent, like all things,

          where the wind plants you,

          one or another of you forever

          looking down and seeing some image

          of water, and hearing what? Waves,

          and over waves, birds singing.

 

robert motherwell

 

The buzzer on the dryer was my signal to wrap it up, fold the laundry and return home. It felt like I had just begun with Louise Gluck's poems. I could have sat with her hours more. And will. It's my book. I brought it home. Hers are internal journeys. I follow the lead of the words to see where they go, a winding trail that is never predictable. It's like driving Glade Valley Road; surprise turns left or right, the steering wheel always in motion. Attempting to drive the road too fast it becomes a struggle. Settling into it at 30 and 35 mph, it's a smooth flow going with the hills and curves. Louise Gluck's poems are a struggle to keep up with in a hurry, but slow down to the rate of flow in the poem and it becomes an easy, lilting flow something like following the dog, walking a deer trail through the woods. I come out of a round with her poems with my head feeling as clear as during a walk among the trees. It was a good cleansing today, body, mind and soul.  

 

robert motherwell

 

 

 

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