Poetbabble

Reasons to Survive November

November like a train wreck –
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze –
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

– Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

- Tony Hoaglund

I do not like the idea of happiness—it is too momentary—I would say that I was always busy and interested in something—interest has more meaning to me than the idea of happiness.

- Georgia O’Keeffe

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other’s bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: They know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health - just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

-Ted Kooser

(measart)

James Hall: I love that you risk sentimentality in the poems. Can you talk about how you construct a poem’s emotion without letting that emotion subsume the poem? What tools are available to a poet to mitigate emotion successfully?

Richard Siken: I didn’t see it as risking anything, and I suppose the tool for mitigating emotion is undercutting, but I’ll try to answer the question sideways: Even if you don’t believe in God, you have to believe in narrative. Things happen, one after another, world without end. Just because you’re self-aware doesn’t mean you can change what’s happening. Eventually someone is going to break your heart. Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking “I am falling to the floor crying” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it—you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well and when you’re having sex with your next lover on this very floor they will also notice that you didn’t paint it very well and they will think less of you for it. And then you think “Is that sentence too long?” And then you have to hold the  contradictions of sobbing uncontrollably and wondering about grammar in your head at the same time. I think if you are true to the entire experience, not just the sad part, you don’t risk sentimentality because you’re not overloading the experience with fake, melodramatic feeling. I also hear that whispering helps.

(via kathleenjoy:ahuntersheart)

I just saw a(nother) clip of a show in which a size-8 model was told by fashion designers that she would never be booked for a runway show because she was too big. “We only book size 2.”

This is a dead horse we have been beating for too long.

But perhaps we are not appealing to fashion designers in a way they understand. Perhaps it is a failure of communication, language, and logic as well.

Even were one not concerned with the way such culture creates unattainable standards for women and excludes women of all sizes and shapes, doesn’t it seem odd that these particular “artists” are so rigid in their aesthetic visions as a group? I mean, I would understand if one particular designer had a very specific aesthetic vision that required waif; but all of them with the same vision? Yawwwwn.

Painters don’t all use the same size canvas to convey their inspirations. Sculptors don’t always create using the same size marble or stone. Poets use different forms upon which to drape their words. Seriously, imagine a world where every poem was a sonnet, every painting was 4x6, and every novel was a memoir.

Sociological concerns aside, the questions become: If fashion design is “art”, where are the revolutionaries? Where are the artists that are using every medium available in efforts to create? If form follows function, what does their narrow understanding/use of form say about the function of their creativity? Is it even art?

leaving is not enough; you must
stay gone. train your heart 
like a dog. change the locks
even on the house he’s never
visited. you lucky, lucky girl. 
you have an apartment 
just your size. a bathtub
full of tea. a heart the size 
of Arizona, but not nearly
so arid. don’t wish away 
your cracked past, your 
crooked toes, your problems
are papier mache puppets
you made or bought because the vendor
at the market was so compelling you just
had to have them. you had to have him.
and you did. and now you pull down 
the bridge between your houses,
you make him call before 
he visits, you take a lover
for granted, you take 
a lover who looks at you
like maybe you are magic. make
the first bottle you consume
in this place a relic. place it 
on whatever altar you fashion
with a knife and five cranberries.
don’t lose too much weight.
stupid girls are always trying 
to disappear as revenge. and you 
are not stupid. you loved a man
with more hands than a parade 
of beggars, and here you stand. heart
like a four-poster bed. heart like a canvas. 
heart leaking something so strong 
they can smell it in the street.

Marty McConnell, “Frida Kahlo to Marty McConnell”

beautyabounds: (via ephemerals) (via annarchy) (via cfbwe:)

Dear Lorca,

   These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written.
      In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately—an historical patchwork (whether made up of elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet’s home town, or obscure bits of magic published by pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation—but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.
      See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents—poetry discloses.
      A mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep—and my dreams will be prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.
      You are dead and the dead are very patient.

                                                             love,
                                                               jack

(via onlyondemairt:)

- However, being in a cohabitant relationship probably lessens the pressure about starting a family because it is less expectant of them.

- Childhood obesity is a large problem in the United States. The number of children who are considered “fat” by medical standards is expanding.

This morning I woke to a soft thud, the sound of some heavy thing hitting the wall. I lay in bed listening, while late dawn shimmered off the bay, played prismatic through the windows, against the walls.

Again, the thud, and then another, the hard flapping of sturdy wings against glass. It seemed to be coming from inside the house, and I slipped out of bed and made my way to the bedroom at the back of the house. 

I was completely bewildered to find a barn swallow panicked and trapped in the bedroom. She was throwing herself at the bright windows, and it seemed, to me, not a mistaken understanding of glass as sky. Rather, she was using her body as the only tool she had left. Eventually, chest heaving with exhaustion and fear, I assume, she braced along the windowsill.

I thought of the Emerson quote I saw last week: The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when all your arrows are spent.

Of course, my first instinct was to get the window open, and leave her to escape. So, I closed the door behind me and slowly made my way to the window. At my approach, again she flung her body at the window with such force that she fell over, spent.

I reached over and picked her up. And before the birdlovers scold me about touching birds, know that it was instinctual. I knew there would be no other way. I carried her to the front door and stepped out on to the porch, opening my hand.

Instead of flying immediately, she sat there. In. My. Hand. For at least 10-15 seconds. Briefly, I worried she was in shock, or worse, hurt. And maybe it was shock. Maybe she was simply disoriented. Soon, she stepped (it seemed) from my hand into the sky.

I try not to believe in signs. I am careful not to try to connect dots in ways that create what I want to see. I rationalize. I employ all of the usual suspects of logical reasoning.

But I’m a poet, and, though it may be to my detriment, unceasingly romantic in nature. 

I have no idea how she got in to the house, or even how long she was here. But I know how she flew.

Fast and high.

Whether you love what you love or live in divided ceaseless revolt against it, what you love is your fate.

- Frank Bidart

I have agreed to go to Big Country’s Birthday Bash at Ballyhoo’s Bar & Grill.

Once a single-wide trailer, this particular gulf coast dive has been embellished with a series of lean-to trailers and small additions. The low ceilings frame walls covered in dollar bills, license plates, donated ball caps, and fishing lures. Home of the late night trivia adventure and 25-cent PBR, this event, I predict, is a tragedy in the making for me.  Redneck come-ons, Conservative bigotry and religious zeal. Too much whiskey and an open mic.

Consider this a preemptive cautionary tale, full of alliteration and allusions.

Consider this my undoing.

Preface: It is not my job to police students. They are adults. But, I do not budge on basic respect.

Although I believe in wedding technology to the classroom, I had to give “the speech” today, as a student texted on her phone and chatted via IM while in class:

Me, looking over student’s shoulder: Are you IMing? Right now?!

Student: Yes. I…

Me: (incredulous at her rudeness - even by millenial generation standards. We’ve had this talk before.) Upupup…. Get up. I’m serious, get your books and go. Do not come back to this classroom until you speak to me one-on-one.

Student leaves and class is silent:

Me: If you cannot detach from your electronic devices and social networking for one hour and 15 minutes to engage in meaningful dialogue and participate in the study of literature, you are not prepared to be in an academic classroom. And you won’t be.

I have my own ideas (of course), but I’d love to hear from you all. If you had to pick certain poets/poems to be representative of the time period/aesthetic(s) shift from 1945-present, who and what works would be imperative?

So long had life together been that now
the second of January fell again
on Tuesday, making her astonished brow
lift like a windshield wiper in the rain,
    so that her misty sadness cleared, and showed
    a cloudless distance waiting up the road.

So long had life together been that once
the snow began to fall, it seemed unending;
that, lest the flakes should make her eyelids wince,
I’d shield them with my hand, and they, pretending
    not to believe that cherishing of eyes,
    would beat against my palm like butterflies.

So alien had all novelty become
that sleep’s entanglements would put to shame
whatever depths the analysts might plumb;
that when my lips blew out the candle flame,
    her lips, fluttering from my shoulder, sought
    to join my own, without another thought.

So long had life together been that all
that tattered brood of papered roses went,
and a whole birch grove grew upon the wall,
and we had money, by some accident,
    and tonguelike on the sea, for thirty days,
    the sunset threatened Turkey with its blaze.

So long had life together been without
books, chairs, utensils—only that ancient bed—
that the triangle, before it came about,
had been a perpendicular, the head
    of some acquaintance hovering above
    two points which had been coalesced by love.

So long had life together been that she
and I, with our joint shadows, had composed
a double door, a door which, even if we
were lost in work or sleep, was always closed:
    somehow its halves were split and we went right
    through them into the future, into night.