W. D. Snodgrass

Nuphar advena, cow lily, yellow water lily, aka spatterdock [Wikimedia]

The Marsh

by W. D. Snodgrass

Swampstrife and spatterdock

     lull in the heavy waters;

some thirty little frogs

     spring with each step you walk;

a fish’s belly glitters

     tangled by rotting logs.

Over near the grey rocks

     muskrats dip and circle

Out of his rim of ooze

     a silt-black pond snail walks

inverted on the surface

     toward what food he may choose.

You look up; while you walk

     the sun bobs and is snarled

in the enclosing weir

     of trees, in their dead stalks.

Stick in the mud, old heart,

     what are you doing here?

yesterday @ Matt's house:

yesterday from Ben @ a Santa Cruz beach — head on the left, digger right:

Emerita analoga, Pacific sand/mole crab [Benjamin Pappas]

more from Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw:

A person is phobic, that is, mentally unbalanced, when his [sic] fears fail to cancel out his [sic] other fears. The healthy, too, are terrified of heights, but equally terrified of depths, as terrified of dark as light, open spaces as closed. The phobic are overbold, not overly apprehensive, and must be conditioned to fear the opposite of what they fear. The difficulty of such a treatment lies in finding the counterbalancing terror. What is the opposite of a marketplace? A prime number? Blood? A spider?

trimetrogon: a system of aerial photography in which one vertical and two oblique photographs are simultaneously taken for use in topographic mapping

trimetrogon [WikiAnswers]

14 apr 2013

panorama by Jay Hosler

Ezra Pound: Richard St. Victor has left us one very beautiful passage . . . by naming over all the most beautiful things we know we may draw back upon the mind some vestige of the heavenly splendor

rabbits

parrots

yellow flowers

steamed vegetables

Tova smile

a male mallard’s head color

a fox tail

hummingbird gleam

sunrise

crescent moon

rain smell

asparagus & shrimp

sleep

boiled rice

sea turtle

hapu’u fern frond

egg hatch

cactus bloom

scanning electron microscope

Membracidae, treehopper [courtesy of Dartmouth]

esemplastic: unifying; having the power to shape disparate things into a unified whole

14 apr 2013

Donald Hall (so NOT my favorite poet) mentions a bobolink in his poem "Summer Kitchen." Bobolinks migrate between the US & Argentina. I've never seen one:

Bobolink, Dolichonyx oryzivorus, male in breeding plumage
[courtesy of Greg Schneider]

I'm sure Quaker women fashioned their day/prayer caps after this bird's plumage.

Natalie Barney wasn't Quaker.

Natalie Barney [courtesy of The Qouch]

The Return

by Ezra Pound

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,

fear, as half-awakened;

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

             and half turn back;

These were the "Wing'd-with-Awe,"

             inviolable.

Gods of that wingèd shoe!

With them the silver hounds,

             sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie!

     These were the swift to harry;

These the keen-scented;

These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash,

             pallid the leash-men!

blague, "A 'blague' when it is a fine blague is a satire upon stupidity, an attack. It is the weapon of intelligence at bay; of intelligence fighting against an alignment of odds." [Pound, 1915]

Carol Peters, southern California, 1976 [pic by Jay Hosler]

13 apr 2013

for my mother on her birthday

gardening with her head among the marigolds

the miracle was in her falling

Fremontodendron californicum

California flannelbush

also known as California fremontia and flannel flower

thank you, Jay Hosler, for the flora ID

12 apr 2013

Eschscholzia californica, California poppy — right now, everywhere [courtesy Santa Cruz Wiki]

the red-winged blackbird

so beak in flower

doesn't fly up
though I walk right by

Walnut Avenue near Pacific in the 1870's [courtesy of Santa Cruz Public Libraries]

in which century

was this field all flower?

Santa Cruz Mountains [courtesy of The Mountain Gardener's Weblog]

11 apr 2013

epicene: having characteristics of both sexes or neither sex or some indeterminate sex or some unnamed or unutterable, some ingenious sex, some unforeseen or unorthodox sex that baffles some people, turns them wary, defensive, awkwardly jocular, downright hostile & afraid

William Blake: to generalize is to be an idiot

Dana Levin

from Dana Levin’s essay “Who Is Who: Pronouns, Gender, and Merging Selves” @ Los Angeles Review of Books:

the use of “they,” “their,” and “them” to refer to those of unknown gender has always been a common feature of English, especially when spoken aloud. This is exactly why, Bodine explains, two centuries of attempts to teach and legislate it away has largely failed — except, perhaps, in the red-lined realms of English Composition. . . .

our average ancestral grammarian was not generous. He was an ordinary sexist with control issues, if we want to psychoanalyze the amount of energy, outrage and certitude he and his brethren put into the proscription against “he or she” and singular “they.” . . .

perhaps the common use of singular “they” suggested that the language (and hence the mind) had a kind of intuition: that self is multiple. . . .

many Victorian grammar hounds were on the hunt for it . . . an epicene, or bisexual pronoun, a linguistic gem of power from a logoshangri-la. . . .

other languages had gender neutral pronouns: Standard Bengali, Estonian, Hungarian, and other Uralic languages, Nahuatl (indigenous language of Central Mexico), Indonesian and Mandarin amongst the crew. “The Finnish language does not support gender-specific pronouns,” states Wiki . . .

speaking of its:

Gwendolyn Brooks [pic courtesy of Phillips Exeter Academy]

Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Each body has its art, its precious prescribed

Pose, that even in passion’s droll contortions, waltzes,

Or push of pain — is its, and nothing else’s.

Each body has its pose. No other stock

That is irrevocable, perpetual

And its to keep. In castle, or in shack.

With rags or robes. Through good, nothing, or ill.

And even in death, a body, like no other

On any hill or plain or crawling cot

Or gentle for the lilyless hasty pall

(Having twisted, gagged, and then sweet-ceased to bother),

Shows the old personal art, the look. Show what

It showed at baseball. What it showed in school.

Miriam & Esther, siblings

these poems:

Joseph Spece: "Among Elks"

Amy Beeder: "Captain Haddock vs. the PTA"

Malachi Black: "Insomnia & So On"

Ben Lerner

wen:  a harmless cyst, especially on the scalp or face, containing the fatty secretion of a sebaceous gland

After the Wen’s Out

spots of white

antibiotic ointment in my hair

look like insect dribble

my attempt to comb them out

snags on a suture

minutes later blood

fingerprints my new-turned page

spills down my forehead

bring ice!

to the downtown poetry reading

I wear a baseball cap

spotted with Hakalau mud

bleached by Hawaii sun

better artist

than head wound

Daniel had hoped the wen might contain insect larva
specifically Dermatobia hominis
but it didn't
we chose pix & bio-disposal over path lab

Ben Lerner [pic courtesy of NPR]

from Ben Lerner’s Angle of Yaw:

The first gaming system was the domesticated flame. Contemporary video games allow you to select the angle from which you view the action, inspiring a rash of high school massacres. Newer games, with their use of small strokes to simulate reflected light, are all but unintelligible to older players. We have abstracted airplanes from our simulators in the hope of manipulating flight as such. Game cheats, special codes that make your character invincible or rich, alter weather conditions or allow you to bypass a narrative stage, stand in relation to video games as prayer to reality. Children, if pushed, will attempt to inflict game cheats on the phenomenal world. Enter up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right, a, b, a, to tear open the sky. Left, left, b, b, to keep warm.

The artist proposes a series of lights attached to tall poles, spaced at intervals along our public roads, and illuminated from dusk to dawn. The public is outraged. The law’s long arm cannot support its heavy hand. The public is outrage. Kingergarteners simulate bayonet fighting with the common domestic fowl. Does this blood look good on me? Does this blood make me look fat? If you replace a cow’s stomach with glass, don’t complain when you cut your mouth.

Laser technology has fulfilled our people's ancient dream of a blade so fine that the person it cuts in half remains standing and alive until he moves and cleaves. Until we move, none of us can be sure that we have not already been cut in half, or in many pieces, by a blade of light. It is safest to assume that our throats have already been slit, that the slightest alteration in our postures will cause the painless severance of our heads.

Edwin Denby

Edwin Denby & Neil Welliver [pic by Rudy Burckhardt]

The Shoulder

by Edwin Denby

The shoulder of a man is shaped like a baby pig.

It terrifies and it bores the observer, the shoulder.

The Greeks, who had slaves, were able to hitch back and rig

The shoulder, so the eye is flattered and feels bolder.

But that’s not the case in New York, where a roomer

Stands around day and night stupefied with his clothes on

The shoulder, hung from his neck (half orchid, half tumor)

Hangs publicly with a metabolism of its own.

After it has been observed a million times or more

A man hunches it against a pole, a jamb, a bench,

Parasite he takes no responsibility for.

He becomes used to it, like to the exhaust stench.

It takes the corrupt, ectoplasmic shape of a prayer

Or money, that connects with a government somewhere.

David Shields [pic courtesy of theguardian]

from David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life:

[re David Foster Wallace] never not epistemologically lost, psychologically needy, humanly flawed

[re J. D. Salinger] how his voice . . . talks back to itself, how it listens to itself talking, comments upon what it hears, and keeps talking. This self-awareness, this self-reflexivity, is the pleasure and burden of being conscious, and the gift of his work — what makes me less lonely and makes life more livable — lies in its revelation that this isn’t a deformation in how I think; this is how human beings think. I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive. . . .

Isn’t this what all writing is, more or less — taking the raw data of the world and editing it, framing it, thematizing it, running your voice and vision over it?. . .

I believe in art as pathology lab, landfill, recycling station, death sentence, aborted suicide note, lunge at redemption.

Your art is most alive and dangerous when you use it against yourself. That’s why I pick at my scabs.

Don’t get over anything. . . . This is the extent of my philosophy. Failure is the only subject.

7 apr 2013

Civil Space

I feel our borrowed car

contact the car

behind us

the slightest bump

a nearly zero-

impact collision

surprise, yes, shock

Mike believes

the other driver hit us

as Mike was shifting

into reverse

doesn’t believe

he backed into him

we all disembark

look at the cars

no damage

to either car

to any person

I’m sorry, Mike says

the other driver

raises his arms, raises

his voice at Mike

This is not good

We have a problem

the other driver

repeats himself

pushes himself

in Mike’s face

demands that Mike

repeat a string of words

the other invents

I’m sorry, it was

all my fault

Mike says it

the other slaps

Mike’s shoulder

we walk away

Edwin Denby [pic by Rudy Burckhardt]

from Edwin Denby's The Complete Poems, ed. Ron Padgett:

The Subway

The subway flatters like the dope habit,

For a nickel extending peculiar space:

You dive from the street, holing like a rabbit,

Roar up a sewer with a millionaire’s face.

Squatting in the full glare of the locked express

Imprisoned, rocked, like a man by a friend’s death,

O how the immense investment soothes distress,

Credit laps you like a huge religious myth.

It’s a sound effect. The trouble is seeing

(So anaesthetized) a square of bare throat

Or the fold at the crotch of a clothed human being:

You’ll want to nuzzle it, crop at it like a goat.

That’s not in the buy. The company between stops

Offers you security, and free rides to cops.

A Sonnet Sequence: Dishonor

Introduction

Happy in health not poor and with good friends

On the bright beach at noon I chanced to meet

The filthy double of me who attends

To secret matters I don’t care to treat.

Repulsive and halfwitted that fine morning

I started to pretend I didn’t know him

But he in fury with no word of warning

Stuck out his tongue to show me what I owe him.

His tongue licked up the sky that crumbled blackened

Sucked out my breath and peeled me like a shrimp

It stood up then majestically fecund

Death’s own bisexual self-polluting pimp.

To him, his whore, these little dreams of hate

To get my honor back I dedicate.

. . .

5 [excerpt]

A lover’s home is in the facts of his dreams

Where he skins his love like a rabbit to his own screams.