January 31st, 2013 by Jay | Topic: Art, Poetry |
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Frank Auerbach, “Primrose Hill,” oil paint on board, 1967-8. Collection: Tate, London.
Though they likely never met, British painter Frank Auerbach (b.1931) and American poet William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) are seen here walking the primrose path together up and around Primrose Hill.
Primrose By William Carlos Williams
Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow! It is not a color. It is summer! It is the wind on a willow, the lap of waves, the shadow under a bush, a bird, a bluebird, three herons, a dead hawk rotting on a pole– Clear yellow! It is a piece of blue paper in the grass or a threecluster of green walnuts swaying, children playing croquet or one boy fishing, a man swinging his pink fists as he walks– It is ladysthumb, forget-me-nots in the ditch, moss under the flange of the carrail, the wavy lines in split rock, a great oaktree– It is a disinclination to be five red petals or a rose, it is a cluster of birdsbreast flowers on a red stem six feet high, four open yellow petals above sepals curled backward into reverse spikes– Tufts of purple grass spot the green meadow and clouds the sky.
January 25th, 2013 by Jay | Topic: Poetry |
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This morning serendipity caused me to trip over and into this wonderful poem by the great American modernist poet Marianne Moore, “Style” (c. 1956). Revel in the language and the waltz of words. Revel, I say. Revel too in the names of Moore’s characters and allusions, some of which Ms. Moore elaborated upon in end-notes to her poem; I’ve added my own explicatory revelations and links at the bottom of this post.
Follow the plumbline past the tilted hat…
STYLE
revives in Escudero’s constant of the plumbline, axis of the hairfine moon–his counter-camber of the skater. No more fanatical adjuster of the tilted hat than Escudero; of tempos others can’t combine. And we — besides evolving the classic silhouette, Dick Button whittled slender–
have an Iberian-American champion yet, the deadly Etchebaster. Entranced, were you not, by Soledad? black-clad solitude that is not sad; like a letter from Casals; or perhaps say literal alphabet S soundholes in a ‘cello set contradictorily; or should we call her
la lagarta? or bamboos with fireflies a-glitter; or glassy lake and the whorls which a vertical stroke brought about, of the paddle half-turned coming out. As if bisecting a viper, she can dart down three times and recover without a disaster, having been a bull-fighter. Well; she has a forgiver.
Etchebaster’s art, his catlike ease, his mousing pose, his genius for anticipatory tactics, preclude envy as the traditional unwavy Sandeman sailor is Escudero’s; the guitar, Rosario’s– wrist-rest for a dangling hand that’s suddenly set humming fast fast fast and faster.
There is no suitable simile. It is as though the equidistant three tiny arcs of seeds in a banana had been conjoined by Palestrina; it is like the eyes, of say the face of Palestrina by El Greco. O Escudero, Soledad, Rosario Escudero, Etchebaster!
December 19th, 2012 by Martin | Topic: Poetry |
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The Long Road by Robert Creeley
The long road of it all is an echo a sound like an image expanding, frames growing one after another in ascending or descending order, all of us a rising, falling thought, an explosion of emptiness soon forgotten
*
As a kid I wondered where do they go, my father dead. The place had a faded dustiness despite the woods and all. We grew up. I see our faces in old school pictures. Where are we now?
Video: “The Long Road” by Robert Creeley, from The United States of Poetry episode, “The Word.” Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.
Text/Poem: “The Long Road” by Robert Creeley (1996).
November 23rd, 2012 by Martin | Topic: Poetry |
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The Librarian By Charles Olson
The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester, the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which (from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.
In this night I moved on the territory with combinations (new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader, my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.
My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop, there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then, I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)
before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf- house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,
I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years. But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.
His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I found him intimate with my former wife: this boy was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!
Black space, old fish-house. Motions of ghosts. I, dogging his steps. He (not my father, by name himself with his face twisted at birth) possessed of knowledge pretentious giving me what in the instant I knew better of.
But the somber place, the flooring crude like a wharf’s and a barn’s space
I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was
here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut! But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party
I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort. The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library
was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking
down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern
The places still half-dark, mud, coal dust.
There is no light east of the Bridge
Only on the headland toward the harbor from Cressy’s
have I seen it (once when my daughter ran out on a spit of sand
isn’t even there.) Where is Bristow? when does I-A get me home? I am caught
in Gloucester. (What’s buried behind Lufkin’s Diner? Who is
October 4th, 2012 by Jay | Topic: Music, Poetry |
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I saw Wilco perform at the Greek Theater in Berkeley a couple weeks ago, and is was a fantastic show. One of the songs they played, California Stars, is one of my favorite Wilco songs, and in the above video they can be seen playing it at the same Greek Theater five years ago.
Today is National Poetry Day in the UK, and the theme is “Stars.” What better way to salute British poetry than with a song penned by a quintessential American folk icon? California Stars is a beautiful poem/song written by Woody Guthrie, but never recorded until Wilco and Billy Bragg put it on Mermaid Avenue (1998), one of two albums they produced of songs created from a sheaf of unreleased Guthrie lyrics. This year, in honor of Guthrie’s 100th birthday, the two Mermaid Avenue albums, plus outtakes and interviews, have been released in a new boxed set, Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions. Enjoy.
California Stars
I’d like to rest my heavy head tonight On a bed of California stars I’d like to lay my weary bones tonight On a bed of California stars I’d love to feel your hand touching mine And ell me why i must keep working on Yes, I’d give my life to lay my head tonight On a bed of California stars
I’d like to dream my troubles all away On a bed of California stars Jump up from my starbed and make another day Underneath my California stars They hang like grapes on vines that shine And warm the lovers glass like friendly wine So, I’d give this world just to dream a dream with you On our bed of California stars
~Words by Woody Guthrie, music by Jay Bennett/Jeff Tweedy
The Argument of Innocence can only be lost if it is won
Veres describes the evolution of the picture poems, and includes an elucidation of their genesis by the artist’s wife, Miriam Patchen (p. 53-60):
Although Patchen’s drawings of beasties and critters dated back to the 1950s, appearing on the handwritten pages of poetry in his silkscreen folios, it was only in the picture poems of the sixties (published by New Directions in black and white in Hallelujah Anyway, 1966, and But Even So, 1968), that the images and words achieved a truly integrated union, a symbiosis.
Patchen’s picture poems are magical, or, perhaps more properly, “fantastic.” They are messages from other lands, spoken in our vernacular by vaguely familiar creatures. Figures and words share a continuum of visual presence and form a counterpoint of meaning, an interchange of energies. Words as images, images as concepts, co-existing without subservience to each other, are combined to create a richer whole.
Patchen made nearly two hundred of these picture poems, all on very old off-white handmade paper, with uneven, uncut edges, all about eleven and a half by seventeen inches, which gives the impression of found, ancient manuscripts. Present in each of them is the spirit of the intensely personal and the intensely direct gift.
Miriam Patchen: It’s like so many things — inventors work all their lives on trying to do something. The thing they’re doing doesn’t happen and yet accidentally something else happens, and they discover or create something they hadn’t planned on.
In a way, this is almost what happened with Kenneth’s picture poems and painting poems. When he was very uncomfortable in Palo Alto [Patchen had an extremely painful, debilitating chronic spinal injury], bedfast and trying to do things, John Thomas, who is now and was then in the Department of Botany at Stanford, brought us, almost accidentally, some very strange old papers.
Kenneth always loved beautiful paper, lovely types, good books. But these very strange old papers were handmade, of great, great age. They were at Stanford and were used to press, or had been holding, botanical specimens that had come from France many, many years ago. Some of the papers literally went back to the days of Napoleon’s army, and John Thomas was rather shocked when he discovered that the paper was being thrown away and burned when they were reclassifying their botanical specimens. So he, too, was interested in paper and had a little press, and he and Kenneth decided that they might do a couple of Christmas cards on the paper or something like that. But he brought the paper to Kenneth, and Kenneth was just really so fascinated by the paper he would pore over it and pet it and look at it night after night when he couldn’t do anything else. Gradually he began to think that it would be a terrible waste not to do something desirable with the paper. Fine to do the Christmas cards and some printing, yes, but this paper should exist, and continue to exist, because it could; since it was pure rag paper, it could continue to exist for some purpose other than just being around.
He experimented a little with this and a little with that and gradually tested it with color, and that began to intrigue him more and more. And began to make him think of painting on the paper and doing color. Then color began to open up his mind to putting color in a sense visually into his poetry. That led to painting on the papers.
He did some black drawing pages on some of the paper, but still that wasn’t satisfactory enough for the paper’s honor. So gradually the painting forms evolved because of these papers.
My copy of The Argument of Innocence has a wonderful ring stain on the top right of the title page that seems to shine like a gray sun down upon on the title farther down the page. I liked this stained page so much I worked a copy of it into a painting a number of years back, also titled The Argument of Innocence. You can only lose it by winning.
July 2nd, 2012 by Jay | Topic: Poetry |
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The Answer, a poem by the great Robert Creeley. Audio clip of Creeley reading the poem in New York on October 24, 1966, courtesy of PennSound, a treasure trove of poetry audio clips by hundreds of poets, including many more by Creeley.
The Answer
Will we speak to each other making the grass bend as if a wind were before us, will our
way be as graceful, as substantial as the movement of something moving so gently.
We break things into pieces like walls we break ourselves into hearing them fall just to hear it.
June 21st, 2012 by Jay | Topic: Poetry |
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From the YouTube description: “Charles Olson reading ‘In Cold Hell, in Thicket’ (1950) sometime in the mid-60s in Gloucester, MA—late night, recorded for Robert Creeley. Audio courtesy Ron Silliman and PennSound audio archive.” This great video uses found footage from Britton, South Dakota, 1938-39.
In Cold Hell, in Thicket
In cold hell, in thicket, how abstract (as high mind, as not lust, as love is) how strong (as strut or wing, as polytope, as things are constellated) how strung, how cold can a man stay (can men) confronted thus?
All things are made bitter, words even are made to taste like paper, wars get tossed up like lead soldiers used to be (in a child’s attic) lined up to be knocked down, as I am, by firings from a spit-hardened fort, fronted as we are, here, from where we must go
God, that man, as his acts must, as there is always a thing he can do, he can raise himself, he raises on a reed he raises his
Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1991) by Joni Mitchell
The Second Coming (1919) by William Butler Yeats
Turning and turning Within the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer Things fall apart The center cannot hold And a blood dimmed tide Is loosed upon the world
Nothing is sacred The ceremony sinks Innocence is drowned In anarchy The best lack conviction Given some time to think And the worst are full of passion Without mercy
Surely some revelation is at hand Surely it’s the second coming And the wrath has finally taken form For what is this rough beast Its hour come at last Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Hoping and hoping As if by my weak faith The spirit of this world Would heal and rise Vast are the shadows That straddle and strafe And struggle in the darkness Troubling my eyes
Shaped like a lion It has the head of a man With a gaze as blank And pitiless as the sun And it’s moving its slow thighs Across the desert sands Through dark indignant Reeling falcons
Surely some revelation is at hand Surely it’s the second coming And the wrath has finally taken form For what is this rough beast Its hour come at last Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
Raging and raging It rises from the deep Opening its eyes After twenty centuries Vexed to a nightmare Out of a stony sleep By a rocking cradle By the Sea of Galilee
Surely some revelation is at hand Surely it’s the second coming And the wrath has finally taken form For what is this rough beast Its hour come at last Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born Slouching towards Bethlehem to be born
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 Spiritus 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?
June 8th, 2012 by Jay | Topic: Poetry |
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Congratulations to Natasha Trethewey, who has been named the new poet laureate of the United States, the Library of Congress announced yesterday. Here are some excerpts from the New York Times story, New Laureate Looks Deep Into Memory, followed by two of Ms. Trethewey’s poems, Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or The Mulata, and Monument:
…the next poet laureate is Natasha Trethewey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of three collections and a professor of creative writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Ms. Trethewey, 46, was born in Gulfport, Miss., and is the first Southerner to hold the post since Robert Penn Warren, the original laureate, and the first African-American since Rita Dove in 1993.
…Unlike the recent laureates W. S. Merwin and her immediate predecessor, Philip Levine, both in their 80s when appointed, Ms. Trethewey, who will officially take up her duties in September, is still in midcareer and not well-known outside poetry circles. Her work combines free verse with more traditional forms like the sonnet and the villanelle to explore memory and the racial legacy of America. Her fourth collection, “Thrall,” is scheduled to appear in the fall. She is also the author of a 2010 nonfiction book, “Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.”
…Ms. Trethewey’s great theme is memory, and in particular the way private recollection and public history sometimes intersect but more often diverge. “The ghost of history lies down beside me,” she writes in one of her poems, “rolls over, pins me beneath a heavy arm.”
Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus, or The Mulata by Natasha Trethewey
—after the painting by Diego Velàzquez, ca. 1619
She is the vessels on the table before her: the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red and upside down. Bent over, she is the mortar and the pestle at rest in the mortar—still angled in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand. She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow— the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her: his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.
Monument by Natasha Trethewey
Today the ants are busy beside my front steps, weaving in and out of the hill they’re building. I watch them emerge and—
like everything I’ve forgotten—disappear into the subterranean, a world made by displacement. In the cemetery last June, I circled, lost—
weeds and grass grown up all around— the landscape blurred and waving. At my mother’s grave, ants streamed in and out like arteries, a tiny hill rising
above her untended plot. Bit by bit, red dirt piled up, spread like a rash on the grass; I watched a long time the ants’ determined work,
how they brought up soil of which she will be part, and piled it before me. Believe me when I say I’ve tried not to begrudge them
their industry, this reminder of what I haven’t done. Even now, the mound is a blister on my heart, a red and humming swarm.
The heavy bear who goes with me, A manifold honey to smear his face, Clumsy and lumbering here and there, The central ton of every place, The hungry beating brutish one In love with candy, anger, and sleep, Crazy factotum, dishevelling all, Climbs the building, kicks the football, Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.
Breathing at my side, that heavy animal, That heavy bear who sleeps with me, Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar, A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp, Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope Trembles and shows the darkness beneath. —The strutting show-off is terrified, Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants, Trembles to think that his quivering meat Must finally wince to nothing at all.
That inescapable animal walks with me, Has followed me since the black womb held, Moves where I move, distorting my gesture, A caricature, a swollen shadow, A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive, Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness, The secret life of belly and bone, Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown, Stretches to embrace the very dear With whom I would walk without him near, Touches her grossly, although a word Would bare my heart and make me clear, Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed Dragging me with him in his mouthing care, Amid the hundred million of his kind, The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.
1. Schwartz’s epigraph is a reference is to the unity of mind and body in the work of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. See this excerpt from “Process and Feeling” by Jeremy W. Hayward:
Process philosophy was first proposed by that great English gentleman, mathematician and philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, fifty years ago. Whitehead takes great care to show process philosophy to be a natural outcome of the Western tradition and to provide solutions to many of the seemingly intractable problems that had arisen in that tradition. It arises as a criticism of Berkeley, Hume, Locke, and Descartes, especially, but goes all the way back to find its roots in Plato and Aristotle. Whitehead himself is regarded by many as the greatest Western philosopher since Plato.
…Whitehead then points to a more primitive, and more fundamental, mode of perception at the level of feeling, which he calls “causal efficacy.” We can begin to understand causal efficacy when we acknowledge the mind-body unity and the “withness” of the body in all experience. We experience with the body. We do not merely see “red”; we see “red” with the eyes, we hear a sound with the ears, and so on. Whitehead points out that it is this “withness” that makes the body the starting point for our knowledge of our world. Therefore, the “withness of the body,” rather than be dismissed as irrelevant, must form the foundation of our theory of experience as perception.
April 29th, 2012 by Martin | Topic: Poetry |
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A Testimonial by Sparrow
I have lived in this city 25 years and all that time I have dropped things. I’ve dropped tissues, letters from women in Santa Fe, N.M., money, the keys to my house, books by Jacques Prevert. And all this time, you, the people of this city, have pointed to me, and said, “Hey!” “Sir!” “You! You dropped something!” and then I’ve picked it up. You have watched over me all these years, and I’ve waited till now to thank you.
From The United States of Poetry episode “The Land and the People.” Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.
April 26th, 2012 by Jay | Topic: Poetry |
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Left: Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924, by Alexander Rodchenko. Right: The Collected Poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated by Dorian Rottenberg, USSR, 1972.
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was the leading poet of Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period. He was, “an individualist and a rebel against established taste and standards, one of the founders of Russian Futurism movement. Originally Mayakovsky planned to become an artist. His early poems have strong painterly visions and sequences in many of his works recall film techniques. Mayakovsky was deeply concerned with the problem of death throughout his life, and in 1930, troubled by critics and disappointment in love, he shot himself with a pocket pistol.” (Authors’ Calendar)
Mayakovsky is often associated with the Soviet regime, and has been in and out of favor because of that, though he did become disillusioned with the Soviet cause by the end of his life. He is not by any means my favorite Russian poet of the era, and I mainly wanted an excuse to post the image of that cool book cover above, but here’s an early Mayakovsky poem from 1913 that I quite like:
What About You?
I splashed some colours from a tubler and smeared the drab world with emotion. I charted on a dish of jelly the jutting cheekbones of the ocean. Upon the scales of a tin salmon I read the calls of lips yet mute. And you, could you have played a nocturne with just a drainpipe for a flute?
I come back to the geography of it, the land falling off to the left where my father shot his scabby golf and the rest of us played baseball into the summer darkness until no flies could be seen and we came home to our various piazzas where the women buzzed
To the left the land fell to the city, to the right, it fell to the sea
I was so young my first memory is of a tent spread to feed lobsters to Rexall conventioneers, and my father, a man for kicks, came out of the tent roaring with a bread-knife in his teeth to take care of the druggist they’d told him had made a pass at my mother, she laughing, so sure, as round as her face, Hines pink and apple, under one of those frame hats women then
This, is no bare incoming of novel abstract form, this
is no welter or the forms of those events, this,
Greeks, is the stopping of the battle
It is the imposing of all those antecedent predecessions, the precessions
of me, the generation of those facts which are my words, it is coming
from all that I no longer am, yet am, the slow westward motion of
March 24th, 2012 by Martin | Topic: Poetry |
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Telephone Booth Number 905 1/2 by Reverend Pedro Pietri
woke up this morning feeling excellent, picked up the telephone dialed the number of my equal opportunity employer to inform him I will not be in to work today. “Are you feeling sick?” the boss asked me “No Sir,” I replied: “I am feeling too good to report to work today. If I feel sick tomorrow I will come in early!”
From The United States of Poetry episode “A Day in the Life.” Copyright Washington Square Arts, 1995.
Congratulations to Natasha Trethewey, who has been named the new poet laureate of the United States, the Library of Congress announced yesterday. Here are some excerpts from the New York Times story, 
