Ted Berrigan

[The Jim Carroll Website]

from Ted Berrigan's Sonnets:

XXXVIII

Sleep half sleep half silence and with reasons

For you I starred in the movie

Made on the site

Of Benedict Arnold’s triumph, Ticonderoga, and

I shall increase from this

As I am a cowboy and you imaginary

Ripeness begins corrupting every tree

Each strong morning          A man signs a shovel

And so he digs        It hurts          and so

We get our feet wet in air           we love our lineage

Ourselves        Music, salve, pills, kleenex, lunch

And the promise never to truckle         A man

Breaks his arm and so he sleeps      he digs

In sleep half silence and with reason

[do you hear Heaney? who wrote which poem first? did either know the other?]

Jules Laforgue

Jules Laforgue [Caponnetto-Poesiaperta]

David Arkell's ludicrously ill-informed summation of Jules Laforgue's invention of vers libre from Arkell's informative but mediocre Looking for Laforgue: an informal biography:

Laforgue’s vers libre had emerged in a way that was natural, gradual and inevitable. It came directly from his own previous poetry and from nowhere else. So desperate was he to burst out of his formal strait-jacket that certain pages of the Complaintes were already vers libre in all but name (for example, the last fifteen lines of the ‘Complainte des formalités nuptiales’). Then again there are highly wrought passages of prose in the Moralités which, given a nudge, also break up into vers libre (as we have seen in parts of ‘Hamlet’). But vers libre, as evolved by Laforgue, was something quite personal. It was to be followed very closely — in a spirit of homage — by T. S. Eliot. But none of Laforgue’s contemporaries produced anything comparable. The two so-called vers libre poems by Rimbaud are irrelevant here, as is the entire output of Whitman, not to mention the Kahns and Krysinskas. Neither Whitman nor Rimbaud used rhyme in their free verse, whereas with Laforgue it remains an important element. The essence of Laforgue’s vers libre is that it does not abandon the best of traditional poetry. With great skill it preserves all that is worth saving. Without ever rejecting exact rhymes, he adds the subtleties of internal rhymes and half-rhymes. He never spurns an old quatrain or couplet or rolling alexandrine if it can do something for the poem. Above all he includes wit and keeps out rhetoric. It was a form of vers libre that even Eliot in the end unfortunately rejected, though ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Portrait of a Lady’ were in a sense its apotheosis in English.

Charles Tomlinson

Charles Tomlinson [PennSound]

from Charles Tomlinson's Selected Poems:

Canal

Swans. I watch them

come unsteadying

the dusty, green

and curving arm

of water. Sinuously

both the live

bird and the bird

the water bends

into a white and wandering

reflection of itself,

go by in grace

a world of objects.

Symmetrically punched

now empty rivet-

holes betray

a sleeper fence:

below its raggedness

the waters darken

and above it rear

the saw-toothed houses

which the swinging

of the water makes

scarcely less regular

in repetition. Swans

are backed by these, as

these are by

a sky of silhouettes,

all black and almost

all, indefinite.

A whitish smoke

in drifting diagonals

accents, divides

the predominance of street

and chimney lines,

where all is either

mathematically supine

or vertical, except

the pyramids of slag.

And, there, unseen

among such angularities —

a church, a black

freestanding witness

that a space of graves

invisibly is also

there. Only

its clock identifies

the tower between

the accompaniment of stacks

where everything

repeats itself —

the slag, the streets

and water that repeats

them all again

and spreads them rippling

out beneath

the eye of the discriminating

swans that seek

for something else

and the blank brink

concludes them without conclusion.

The Fox Gallery

A long house —

the fox gallery you called

its upper storey, because

you could look down to see

(and did) the way a fox would

cross the field beyond

and you could follow out, window

to window, the fox's way

the whole length of the meadow

parallel with the restraining line

of wall and pane, or as far

as that could follow the sense of all

those windings. Do you remember

the morning I woke you with the cry

Fox fox and the animal

came on — not from side

to side, but straight

at the house and we craned

to see more and more, the most

we could of it and then

watched it sheer off deterred

by habitation, and saw

how utterly the two worlds were

disparate, as that perfect

ideogram for agility

and liquefaction flowed

away from us rhythmical

and flickering and

that flare was final.

Blaise Cendrars

Blaise Cendrars [Ike]

from Blaise Cendrars's The Astonished Man:

It was only gradually, and after a long experience of driving, little by little as cars were perfected and roads improved, and one could at last travel at speed, pure speed, that I realized I was insensibly stripping myself bare of everything by forging ahead into the unknown, for to what can one compare speed if not to the slow thrust of thought, which progresses on a metaphysical plane, penetrating, isolating, analysing, dissecting everything, reducing the world to a little pile of aerodynamized ashes (the corners worn away by the wind of the mind!) and magically reconstructing the universe by a fulgurating formula which claps between inverted commas (or the two points between which a record is broken) this illumination which restores life: ‘All the world’s my stage’. . . .

here I only want to pencil in the portrait of Manolo Secca. He is a saint. On my way down, I only passed by, stopping long enough to fill up at the pump; on the return journey, I stayed with him for a week, up to my neck in a barrel of paraffin to get rid of the vermin: lice, jiggers, eggs and larvae that cling to you when you come out of the bush, the hinterland, the swamps and the oceans of grass, and make your skin itch; then I filled up the tank and set off again. . . .

Manolo Secca is taciturn and gives nothing away. All day long, throughout the years and years and years that he has been there, at the frontier of the imaginable world, a desert-like zone that took me two weeks to cross by car, he carves statues out of sections of tree-trunk, which he cuts down himself, black statues and white statues, according to the wood he has chosen, cajù and Brazilian rosewood, life-size figures in small cars, so small that each personage has his own car. He works in a dozen studios at once, spreading out in a circle around the petrol pump, and, when I was staying with him, I counted exactly three hundred and eight figures, some of them finished and others barely outlined or rough-hewn. . . . The curious thing was that all these ridiculous little cars were saloons and the figures were standing on the roofs. Manolo Secca was so amazed by my open car, a grand tourisme tourer, that he took the measurements, promising to carve my statue standing in my life-size car and to place it in front of the petrol pump. ‘You have opened my eyes,’ he mumbled.

Ki no Tsurayuki

Ki no Tsurayuki [Wikipedia]

tanka from Ki no Tsurayuki's The Tosa Diary, A.D. 935, tr. William N. Porter, 1912:

Though upon the shore

Wind-blown waves break into foam

White like flowers in bloom,

Neither nightingales nor spring

Knew these flowers were blossoming.

While I watch the shore

From the swiftly moving ship,

Do the pine trees guess,

That the hills on which they grow

Seem to move along also?

Fast my teardrops fall,

But to twist a silken thread

Surely would be vain;

Who could thread up pearls so frail?

All my skill wound not avail.

Suminoye’s pines,

As I watch them, seem to be

Younger far than I;

I shall vanish from the scene,

But the pines are evergreen.

If the cherry trees

Nevermore burst forth in bloom,

’Twould be better far;

For the saddest time of all

Is the spring, when petals fall.

Amy Catanzano

Amy Catanzano [YouTube]

from Amy Catanzano's iEpiphany:

replicators.

Like flowers taking flight, migration
is always a maiden voyage.

I equip myself with a bionic device for dreaming
through great distances.

You speak in filigree biology.

Tracking the sun across the sky, other things
trade wings, lift off.


timecapsules.

what do you call us now that we are flying?

how should we hope to find our way?

what are our ideal conditions for flight?

what about the stem-cell of the document?

can you move closer into view?

how do you carry your ideas home?

what is the purpose of global positioning?

do you ever construct veils in flight?

what is the best way to travel through a wake?

how do you approach magical ships?

how do you distinguish ships from the sea?

when do you swap your wings to swim?

how do you respond to coral reefs?

when do you climb up toward the sky?

what can you see from the satellite?

at what point do you run out of air?

do you consider re-entry a political act?

where do you head first after getting back?

what do you distribute as you fly?

are you making a permanent move?

how do you display your souvenirs?

what do you exchange for speeds of light?

e e cummings

e e cummings [We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie]

from e e cummings’s Complete Poems:

Chansons Innocentes [excerpt]

I

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it’s

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and          wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it’s

spring

and

       the

             goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

Emily Abendroth

Emily Abendroth [Ahsahta]

from Emily Abendroth’s ]Exclosures[:

We were bred to believe that even trying to make our own lives worth occupying

was the very height of rudeness or imprudence

We were minced into pieces and then recast as the involuntary navigators of an unworkably
narrow map which arrived in our laps under the guise of an etiquette manual . . .


Having reached the limits of recuperation

Having grated harshly against the question of what it was she wanted to recupe

Having first cooped herself up within the miniscule range of choices provided

and then belabored those same joists endlessly, painfully, but without extension

                                                      The person tried earnestly now to ask herself:

Am I in my own life instigating punishment to myself and to those around me,

            rather than seeking rectification for our dynamics or solutions to our confusions?

Am I in my own life delegating away my very livelihood to the state? Am I fated to do so?

Are these the dynamics that if undone could undo prisons?      Could undo derision?

                                                                                              Could undo imperialism?

                            This obscene tension of scale — which the person variously tried to inhale

                            or paled in the face of — was everywhere in the scenes around her.

                            She felt, if only blurrily, the necessity to boil it down, without however

                            making too smooth an oil of it. She felt like, “Shit, what I need to do

                            is to evolve my paranoias, not to dissolve them.” . . .

TESSA: What are the consequences of silence?

To which a single hour’s version of oneself replies:

For me, one of the deepest consequences of silence is how shockingly quickly it achieves the status of involuntary muscle memory. A state wherein, having strongly asserted its unspeakability more than once, it thereafter tends to repeat itself in the form of a habit that unconsciously demands the constant re-exertion of its tactics. We each harbor so many constructed silences inside us whose original ideological impulse (if there ever was one other than fear or self-censorship/self-loathing) we can no longer identify and, more often than not, now openly reject, yet still can’t step out of as an ingrained part of the fabric of our very tissues. A belligerent cell memory, a retreat into instinct, an embodied cause of permanent self-sabotage. These circuit system impulses are the unshed offspring of deeply sown precarities or wells of shame or interior doubt subsequently masqueraded as if stalwart impermeabilities (i.e. forgeries of strength). A series of successive “don’t touch” signs affixed to the very organs. Performing in their operations not unlike a “Danger: Do Not enter” label which can at best safely keep others from wreckage and/or from falling in, but which leaves the area in question completely broken, a barely taped-off hazard zone.

Salvador Dalí

Gaia & Salvador Dali [pinterest]

from Salvador Dalí’s The Secret Life of Salvador Dali:

Throughout my life it has in fact been very difficult for me to get used to the disconcerting and flabbergasting "normality" of the beings who surround me and who people the world. I always say to myself, "Nothing of what might happen ever happens!" I cannot understand why human beings should be so little individualized, why they should behave with such great collective uniformity. Take such a simple thing as amusing oneself by derailing trains! Think of the thousands of kilometres of railroad tracks that cover the earth, in Europe, America and Asia! And what a negligible percentage of those who have a passion for derailing trains ever put it into practice, as compared to the number who have a passion for traveling! When the train wrecker Marouchka was caught in Hungary this was regarded as a sensational and unique event.

I cannot understand why man should be capable of so little fantasy. I cannot understand why bus drivers should not have a desire once in a while to crash into a five-and-ten-cent store window and catch a few toys on the fly for their wives, and amuse the children who happened to be around.

I do not understand, I cannot understand why toilet manufacturers do not put concealed bombs in the flushing compartment of their products which would burst the moment certain politicians pulled the chain.

I cannot understand why bath-tubs are always made in approximately the same shape; why no one invents taxi-cabs more expensive than the others fitted inside with a device for making artificial rain which would oblige the passenger to wear his rain coat when he got in while the weather was fine and sunny outside.

I do not understand why, when I ask for a grilled lobster in a restaurant, I am never served a cooked telephone; I do not understand why champagne is always chilled and why on the other hand telephones, which are habitually so frightfully warm and disagreeably sticky to the touch, are not also put in silver buckets with crushed ice around them.

Telephone frappé, mint-colored telephone, aphrodisiac telephone, lobster-telephone, telephone sheathed in sable for the boudoirs of sirens with fingernails protected with ermine, Edgar Allan Poe telephones with a dead rat concealed within, Boecklin telephones installed inside a cypress tree (and with an allegory of death in inlayed silver on their backs), telephones on the leash which would walk about, screwed to the back of a living turtle . . . telephones . . . telephones . . . telephones . . .

Richard Powers

Richard Powers [LiPo Ching]

from Richard Powers's Orfeo:

The books on Els's shelves did tell a secret history, but one beyond any government's ability to control. Once he discovered the suppressed evidence, all the standard accounts of human affairs turned comical and self-serving. Trade, technology, nations, migrations, industry: the whole drama was really being orchestrated by Earth's five nonillion mutating microbes.

A year of reading, and the scales fell from Els's eyes. Bacteria decided wars, spurred development, and killed off empires. They determined who ate and who starved, who got rich and who sank into disease-ridden squalor. The mouth of any ten-year-old child housed twice as many bugs as there were people on the planet. Every human body depended on ten times more bacterial cells than human cells, and one hundred times more bacterial genes than human ones. Microbes orchestrated the expression of human DNA and regulated human metabolism. They were the ecosystem that we just lived in. We might go dancing, but they called the tune.

A short course in life at its true scale, and Els saw: Humanity would lose its war of purity against infection. The race now bunkered down behind the barricades, surrounded by illegals and sleeper cells of every imaginable strain. For two centuries, humans had dreamed of a germ-free world, and for a few years, people even deluded themselves into thinking that science had beaten the invaders. Now contagion was at the gates, the return of the repressed. Multiple resistant toxic strains were rising up like angry colonial subjects to swamp the imperial outposts. And in a way that Els could not quite dope out, the two nightmares infecting the panicked present — germs and jihadists — had somehow found their overlap in him.

None of the sites reporting on Peter Els's raided library mentioned those other books in his possession — battle manuals that agitated for all-out assault on the general public over the last hundred years. Boulez's Orientations. Schoenberg's Harmonielehre. Messiaen's Technique de mon langage musical. That war had ended long ago, and its struggles were of no consequence to any but the dead. When the body was under attack by invisible agents from every direction, why worry about a thing as vaporous as the soul. . . .

He wants to tell her: Hold on to what you know right now. Let no one persuade you of a single thing. Study your hunger and how to feed it. Trust in whatever sounds twist your viscera. Write in the cadences of first love, of second chances, of air raids, of outrage, of the hideous and the hilarious, of headlong acceptance or curt refusal. Make the bitter music of bumdom, the sad shanties of landlessness, cool at the equator and fluid at the pole. Set the sounds that angels make after an all-night orgy. Whatever lengthens the day, whatever gets you through the night. Make the music that you need, for need will be over, soon enough. Let your progressions predict time's end and recollect the dead as if they're all still here. Because they are.

Edith Södergran

Edith Södergran [Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland]

from Edith Södergran’s Love & Solitude: Selected Poems 1916-1923, tr. Stina Katchadourian:

Violet Twilights

Violet twilights I carry within me from my ancient past,

naked virgins playing with galloping centaurs . . .

Yellow sunshine days with bright glances,

only sunbeams pay proper homage to a tender female body . . .

No man has yet arrived, has ever been, will ever be . . .

A man is a false mirror that the sun’s daughter hurls against the cliffs in rage,

a man is a lie, incomprehensible to pure children,

a man is a rotten fruit rejected by proud lips.

Beautiful sisters, come high up to the strongest rocks,

we are all fighting women, heroines, horsewomen,

eyes of innocence, brows of heaven, rosy faces,

heavy breakers and soaring birds,

we are the least expected and the darkest red,

tigerspots, taut strings, fearless stars.


We Women

We women, we are so close to the brown earth.
We ask the cuckoo what he expects of spring,
we embrace the rugged fir tree,
we look in the sunset for signs & counsel.
Once I loved a man, he believed in nothing . . .
He came on a cold day with empty eyes,
he left on a heavy day with lost memories on his brow.
If my child does not live, it is his . . .

Violetta Skymningar

Violetta skymningar bär jag i mig ur min urtid,

nakna jungfrur lekande med galopperande centaurer . . .

Gula solskensdagar med granna blickar,

endast solstrålar hylla värdigt en ömsint kvinnokropp . . .

Mannen har icke kommit, har aldrig varit, skall aldrig bli . . .

Mannen är en falsk spegel den solens dotter vredgad kastar mot klippväggen,

mannen är en lögn, den vita barn ej förstå,

mannen är en skämd frukt den stolta läppar försmå.

Sköna systrar, kommen högt upp på de starkaste klipporna,

vi äro alla krigarinnor, hjältinnor, ryttarinnor,

oskuldsögon, himmelspannor, rosenlarver,

tunga bränningar och förflugna fåglar,

vi äro de minst väntade och de djupast röda,

tigerfläckar, spända strängar, stjärnor utan svindel.


Vi Kvinnor

Vi kvinnor, vi äro så nära den bruna jorden.
Vi fråga göken, vad han väntar av våren,
vi slå våra armar kring den kala furan,
vi forska i solnedgången efter tecken och råd.
Jag älskade en gång en man, han trodde på ingenting . . .
Han kom en kall dag med tomma ögon,
han gick en tung dag med glömska över pannan.
Om mitt barn icke lever, är det hans . . .

Ezra Pound

Canto 76

erased

In fact a small rain storm . . .

as it were a mouse, out of cloud’s mountain

no cloud, but the crystal body

the tangent formed in the hand’s cup

as live wind in the beech grove

as strong air amid cypress

nothing matters but the quality

of the affection —

Lay in soft grass by the cliff’s edge

with the sea 30 metres below this

and at hand’s span, at cubit’s reach moving,

the crystalline, as inverse of water,

clear over rock-bed

Her bed-posts are of sapphire

for this stone giveth sleep.

Ezra Pound, 1971 [Franz Larese]