Category: Poetry and Poetics

Three Prose Poems 1. He begins the day with very strong, black coffee. He sits in his reading chair and stares at The Iliad. He opens it, reads: “As the fighter tore out the blood came gushing forth / and his heart sank.” He puts the book down and thinks about what the world is like. He thinks it might be a Connecticut chest with a heterogenic antiparticle in the left panel and a pool of dark steaming blood in the right panel. In the center panel, behind the sunflower, there is an inactive slipperette placed catawampus on an ostrich’s brow. In the end, Hector is dragged along the ground and Troy goes up in a blaze. 2. He spent three days writing. On the fourth day he got a haircut. It was a day mixed with thinking and reading. On the fifth day he wrote some more. “For the [...]

Most of the work I do in the garden is a sort of re-reading. I might stare at a spot for a good ten minutes, then go to another place and stare at that same spot again until either satisfaction, or displeasure, or further bafflement causes me to place a few rocks, or to plant a delphinium or conclude: “there’s too much there already. Let it be.” I don’t know what I’m doing and that makes it all the more enjoyable and baffling. I have some vegetables in, but not for the purpose of feeding myself. I intend to give them away. To me, holding up a squash towards a stranger and saying: “here… have a squash,” is a god-almighty amazing experience. Me and the rain and the sun and days of weather went into that gourd’s existence. There’s a bit of the child in it: “See what I made, [...]

Hook I tried to behave with my teaching assistant, with whom I was sleeping, as we laid out fresh worksheets and took positions front and back of a never-so-peaceful classroom. The kindergarteners knew before us, like a game of house, our sixteen inner-city children. Which of those lost boys or girls could be our Peter Pan that year, I mean, if I returned to the role of father Darling after a mostly unnoticed turn as the dancing pirate? Surely D—, if anyone, with whom she watched me slam my fists down in a moment of pure Hook. It should have been me, not him, the janitor helped drag down the hall while she took over, then sobbing in the office that it was me, not him, the devil made do bad things. ____________________________________ J.T. Welsch’s poems have appeared or will shortly appear in Stand, Boston Review, Manchester Review, Blackbox Manifold, [...]

What do animals dream? Do they dream of past lives and unlived dreams unspeakably human or unimaginably bestial? Do they struggle to catch in their slumber what is too slippery for the fingers of day? Are there subtle nocturnal intimations to illuminate their undreaming hours? Are they haunted by specters of regret do they visit their dead in drowsy gratitude? Or are they revisited by their crimes transcribed in tantalizing hieroglyphs? Do they retrace the outline of their wounds or dream of transformation, instead? Do they tug at obstinate knots of inassimilable longings and thwarted strivings? Are there agitations, upheavals, or mutinies against their perceived selves or fate? Are they free of strengths and weaknesses peculiar to horse, deer, bird, goat, snake, lamb or lion? Are they ever neither animal nor human but creature and Being? Do they have holy moments of understanding in the very essence of their entity? [...]

It’s always a relief to me when I see a book published by somebody outside the “poetry ghetto.” Though I’m sure Troy Jollimore has been to his fair share of poetry workshops (who hasn’t?), he is (by trade?) a philosopher, teaching at California State-Chico. It might be wise, therefore, to keep Randall Jarrell’s words on Wallace Stevens (from Poetry and the Age) in mind as we approach Jollimore’s work: Poetry is a bad medium for philosophy. Everything in the philosophical poem has to satisfy irreconcilable requirements: for instance, the last demand that we should make of a philosophy (that it be interesting) is the first we make of a poem; the philosophical poet has an elevated and methodical, but forlorn and absurd air as he works away at his flying tank, his sewing-machine that also plays the piano….When the first thing that Stevens can find to say of the Supreme [...]

So I’m reading, and very much enjoying Ray Hammond’s Poetic Amusement, his masters thesis on the influence of po’biz amid writing programs on American poetry. When I read, I interact with a text, start scribbling my own argument for or against, maybe write a didactic sonnet, or trounce about my house looking for other books that seem pertinent. In chapter 4, Hammond writes about the muse, how the muses have been put on the shelf and replaced by workhop craft. I’m enjoying it because no one speaks about the primal condition of poetry being the ability to “receive” from outside one’s ego, and even one’s consciousness–to be stupid. Stupidity, in its old sense “stupere” means to be stupefied, stunned, left with your mouth agape, and, lo and behold, Hammond quotes Levertov on the original definition of Muse: To contemplate comes from ‘templum, temple, a place, a space for observation marked [...]

IN A FAMILIAR CITY where the grass and the gravel tic-tic-tic on the pavement, the morning sprinters, or on the mountain where there are no trees, or just one, grown light and thinned out of the rock: there might as well be music. There might as well be a certain resting sky, and a picnic to which we are invited. There is plenty of room. The flowerboxes are full of ice. At home, where the loss has always already happened, and the birds have only just come back, the trouble and clench of your fingers are irretrievable in the room’s studio-bright light. There are onlookers: white dress left over a door. Day-moon, hole in the sky’s blue body-armor. How small the road seems in comparison, the lean starts of redbuds spiked up the drive. _______________________________________________ Brittany Perham’s recent work may be found in TriQuarterly, Lo-Ball, Linebreak, and Drunken Boat. Her [...]

Blue Note Because there is only interval quiet, the impossibility of silence even after midnight, I am reaching for a distant tone: a single word, a sum of melody and rhythm in their absence. Clouds with glowing edges suggest extension. Inaudible dust and moths hovering around the floodlight offer suspension. If I say sound alone comprises song, which supposes location, the committee of crickets asserts intention. Great jazz only happens in hard-hitting cities, another era. Even minor sidemen knew that to build a ballad you must shape heartbreak, mimic the ostinato of heart-pump and bloodflow, know when to release a slow brushstroke across the snare drum. When to surrender a breath. Night air streams in place of daylight. A new variation of tired smells— mown grass, a neighbor’s faint cigarette, my perspiration—insists recollection. Not everyone raised here stays. X has not called in eighteen weeks. It’s perfectly fine to be [...]

Many young poets can not accept that telling a story, or relating some sort of narrative arc is conducive to the highest aims of poetry. Of course this is a confusion between story telling and narrative. They are not the same. Narrative is the pulse and rhythm of being. Whitman is an intensely narrative poet, as is Emily Dickinson. Stories stay in touch with this pulse of being in the most obvious ways. The great triumph of Chekhov is that he muted the obviousness of story, blurred the distinctions between plot and character, and took prose into territories of consciousness previously known only to the most subjective and simple of lyrical poems. Story may be destroyed, but never narrative. If I write Oy vey! The sun is batting its eye lashes and I am a tired tree I am, for all my pretensions to surrealism, still in the arms of [...]

Love-Busker I’ve got an ugly, but I’ll never tell, how pretty your please. I’ve got a screw tight, and wheels for wheels, and an *. I’ve got a real good thing, going, so pardon my by- your-leave. A way of opening ah and putting me under. Over and out. I’ve got muscles in there, somewhere. A tooth that won’t grow in. Spit whistle, thumper finger, tin can clang I’m your one man band. A memory of lapses. A good cold. A winterized grin. My boutique hard-sell soft-core will pink you in. It’s rolled-gold bold. If you want love in a king-size bed beware my disease: symptoms: catchall goodwill and a right knee jitter. __________________________________________ Peter Kline‘s poetry has appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Poetry, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of the 2010 Morton Marr Prize from the Southwest Review, as well as a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford [...]

This entry is part of a series, Lowell's Bedlam» , Lowell's Bedlam» NOTE: This is part one of a two-part dialogue on Alfred Corn‘s play Lowell’s Bedlam. The first part, by poet and theater historian M G Stevens, appeared previously. *** Staring out at the audience of the Pentameters Theatre, David Manson as the poet Robert Lowell distrustfully remarks ‘This is a two-way mirror, isn’t it?’ While in Alfred Corn’s play the Bostonian is informed he is looking at a window, part of the work’s triumph is that we obtain a sense throughout that the events we are seeing have been transfigured by a spectator who is both Lowell the artist and Lowell the man, tormented by his past. Observation, here, is everything. The ostensible setting of Lowell’s Bedlam is Pitney Akins Hospital, New York in 1949 where the writer is being treated for bipolar disorder. The director Daniel Ricken, [...]

NOTE: This is part one of a two-part dialogue on Alfred Corn‘s play Lowell’s Bedlam, which had it’s world premiere on April 7, 2011 in London. The second part, by poet John McCullough, appeared afterward. *** The poet Alfred Corn has written a marvelous, sharply observed, and brilliantly imagined play about Robert Lowell’s stay in a mental hospital for his bipolar disorder. Corn includes the poet Elizabeth Bishop and the prose writer Elizabeth Hardwick in his dramatic tale, which is told from the point-of-view of one of the hospital’s denizens, a fellow who befriends Lowell over a card game. Pentameters is one of the oldest fringe theatres in London, famous for its relationships with poets, including Robert Lowell, so it was an equally apt venue to present the world premiere production of this work. Leonie Scott-Matthews, the artistic director at Pentameters for the past forty years, introduced the evening by [...]

Suleiman A simple poem would be content travelling Back from the future to transfer its burden Of knowledge about the present, but this one Stays in that present, unable to see Anything beyond the overrun square. Or mistakes seeing for having just talked, Waits there with permanent demands…. That one too is ultimately simple, As simple as having something to say About death (it’s partially total), As simple as Egypt if Egypt were To live forever on the edges of the square (Twenty years from now the square is gone). The complex poem admits all this From a counter-present the future denies All knowledge of, where talking looks Like seeing and seeing writes it down Whether or not in the order it should It comes. The peaceful transfer of Power from the past to the future Sees the end of a present, escorted By sand. It’s also the complex poem [...]

No Real Than You Are Not to know me is not to not love me. I could be anywhere near you. Lemon meringue? It’s no good unless it falls apart. It not you. Someone put a logo right over my face. Call for the opener of the mouth, Philip Morris. The words want to be alone together. It’s one way to put them through it. Ethics not aesthetics demands it. People yell, attracted by a gesture — personal, spontaneous, sincere. But jammed verbally. It’s all automatic, spooking the flowers. Are you asleep? The sleeper has two left sides. It wants no straps. Its dreams are light glowing up from under flowing water. We’ll finish the story later with the words at hand. Keep a top eye out for visions. NOTE: The art is a sketch by painter George Schneeman, who recently passed away. _____________________________________ Larry Fagin‘s books include Parade of [...]

I always think that a poem “off the page” becomes an “act” of language rather than a poem, a thing made out of words. As such, its visual appeal (or lack thereof) is lost, but its actions are magnified—how it moves within the act of being uttered. It is no longer a poem, but an act of language. By this way of thinking, even a modernist or post modernist poem—fully constructed for its visual as well verbal appeal, even a poem as a “made thing” becomes an “act of language” when read aloud. Such poems often suffer when translated from the realm of the page to that of the heard text. They were not meant to be heard. They are of the cognitive brain, and their affective, animal body is absent except as a structure of intelligence. This does not mean they become bad poems, but it does mean they [...]