poetry patter

happy labor day . . .

2011-08-27T15:44:00.002-05:00

When I was just a little thing
I used to love parades.
With banners, bands, red balloons,
and maybe lemonade.
When I came home one May Day,
my neighbour’s father said,
“Them marchers is all commies.
Tell me kid, are you a Red?”

Well I didn’t know just what he meant-
my hair back then was brown.
Our house was plain red brick-
like most others in the town.
So I went and asked my momma
why our neighbour called me red.
My mummy took me on her knee
and this is what she said,

“Well ya ain’t done nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.
If you marched or agitated,
then you’re bound to hear it said.
So you might as well ignore it
or love the word instead.
Cuz ya ain’t been doing nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.”

When I was growing up,
had my troubles I suppose.
When someone took exception
to my face or to my clothes.
Or tried to cheat me on the job
or hit me on the head.
When I organized to fight back,
why the stinkers called me Red

But ya ain’t done nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red
if you marched or agitated,
then you’re bound to hear it said.
So you might as well ignore it
or love the word instead.
Cuz ya ain’t been doing nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.

When I was living on my own,
one apartment that I had.
Had a lousy rotten landlord
Let me tell you he was bad.
But when he tried to throw me out,
I rubbed my hands and said,
“You haven’t seen a struggle
if you haven’t fought a Red!”

And ya ain’t done nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.
If you marched or agitated,
then you’re bound to hear it said.
So you might as well ignore it
or love the word instead.
Cuz ya ain’t been doing nothing
if ya ain’t been called a Red.

yes, we fight for bread . . . we fight for roses, too . . .

2011-08-19T20:56:00.004-05:00

yes . . . we want bread . . . and yes, we want roses, too . . .

song and singer saving the seventies . . .

2011-08-11T20:56:00.000-05:00

It's Not the Uke Blues

2011-08-03T18:22:00.000-05:00

I was so sad and forlorn I was going to sing the blues.
So I pulled out my Ukelele and tried to pay my dues.
I pulled up a few minor chords just because.
But...then ...what I didn't know was...

You can't play the blues on a Ukelele.
No, you cannot play the blues on a Uke.
You should try a mouth harp, a guitar or even a banjo,
But. you shouldn't play the blues on a Uke.

I mean how can you be sad thinking of Hawaii?
With those palm trees and the ocean all around.
How can the plink tink of a Ukelele.
Do anything but get rid of your frown?

You can't play the blues on a Ukelele.
No, you cannot play the blues on a Uke.
You should try a mouth harp, a guitar or even a banjo,
But. you shouldn't play the blues on a Uke.

Well Jake Shimakaro plays “while my guitar gently weeps”
But he's known for doing the Ukelele impossible.
Picking up and singing with my Uke makes me sappy.
I suddenly forget all the reasons to be unhappy.

You can't play the blues on a Ukelele.
No, you cannot play the blues on a Uke.
You should try a mouth harp, a guitar or even a banjo,
But. you shouldn't play the blues on a Uke.

Geneva Fry
used with permission

soaked in wine . . .

2011-07-28T18:23:00.002-05:00

I'll admit that I enjoy a myriad of things soaked in wine . . . certainly home-cooked dark breads of almost any kind, the crust of Italian bread while eating pasta and a good tomato sauce (or probably a white sauce as well), and of course, the finger-tips of my beloved . . . but this was new to me until I saw it in Anna Nicholas' book Kitchen Garden which A. and I both enjoy browsing while waiting (in the kitchen) for something to reach the correct temperature:

Fennel seeds when soaked in wine
Revitalize a heart that love makes pine.

Ecole de Salerne,1500

Joseph Priestly and mouse poem

2011-07-27T20:49:00.002-05:00

He was just an ordinary mouse, nothing special. He lived, very briefly, 237 years ago, in the laboratory of a great chemist, Joseph Priestley. Here he sits, in his cage.

OH! hear a pensive captive's prayer,
For liberty that sighs ;
And never let thine heart be shut
Against the prisoner's cries.

For here forlorn and sad I sit,
Within the wiry grate ;
And tremble at th' approaching morn,
Which brings impending fate.

If e'er thy breast with freedom glow'd,
And spurn'd a tyrant's chain,
Let not thy strong oppressive force
A free-born mouse detain.

Oh ! do not stain with guiltless blood
Thy hospitable hearth ;
Nor triumph that thy wiles betray'd
A prize so little worth.

The scatter'd gleanings of a feast
My scanty meals supply ;
But if thine unrelenting heart
That slender boon deny,

The chearful light, the vital air,
Are blessings widely given ;
Let nature's commoners enjoy
The common gifts of heaven.

The well taught philosophic mind
To all compassion gives ;
Casts round the world an equal eye,
And feels for all that lives.

If mind, as ancient sages taught,
A never dying flame,
Still shifts thro' matter's varying forms,
In every form the same,

Beware, lest in the worm you crush
A brother's soul you find ;
And tremble lest thy luckless hand
Dislodge a kindred mind.

Or, if this transient gleam of day
Be all of life we share,
Let pity plead within thy breast,
That little all to spare.

So may thy hospitable board
With health and peace be crown'd ;
And every charm of heartfelt ease
Beneath thy roof be found.

So when unseen destruction lurks,
Which men like mice may share,
May some kind angel clear thy path,
And break the hidden snare.

my life has been the poem . . .

2011-07-27T20:33:00.001-05:00

My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.

by Henry David Thoreau

cornbread and beans . . .

2011-07-23T05:46:00.002-05:00

This world, with all its rooms, is my only home.
No one leaves without returning.

We always meet again, so oil the front-porch swing;
prepare the cornbread and beans.

But keep it simple - no flagons of champagne.
No lengthy discourses, no long sighs of farewell.

No need to come in out of the sunshine and rain
until we sit down to the cornbread and beans.

Bill K. Boydstun
used with permission

Independence Day Service

2011-07-04T13:21:00.003-05:00

By invitation, I read (actually sang some of the lines) this "untitled" sonnet of e.e. cummings at an Independence Day celebration at the Unitarian Fellowship of Houston yesterday. I did not actually read the last line of the poem but instead drank from a glass of water and departed the pulpit.

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than those heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead
then shall the voice of liberty be mute?"

He spoke. And drank rapidly a glass of water

e.e. cummings
used without permission

And again from the folder marked "drafts"

2011-06-11T21:07:00.002-05:00

Poem for Andrea

Of all the dreams I've chased --
Those caught and those missed --
You're the only one I sought more than once.
The only time I wanted a second chance:

Roses bloom again after an early freeze;
Peaches sometimes grow on stubborn trees.

bkb
used with permission

Again from the folder marked "drafts"

2011-06-11T20:04:00.003-05:00

Poem

A woman stands at a window looking out.
The window measures from her middle thigh
to six inches above her head.
The frame's width is four times the width of her body.
She is about to turn to her right, but has not moved.
Is there a frown?

Is she about to turn to her right?
She frowns.

Or maybe she should merely sigh
and lean against the white frame of the curtain-less window.

bkb
used with permission

From the folder marked "drafts"

2011-06-11T14:21:00.003-05:00

Der Schmetterling

Angular,
yet grace so unexpected
I wince at the raw,
randy beauty of such symmetry:

Her dance is an invasion of sorts
like an assault on Guadalacanal,
the total commitment
but there is no loss here.
Quark to quark,
she slices to the quick.

There is not so much surrender
to such an assault
as a dawning -
a primordial sun
bursting upon a new day
filled with colors
as subtle as a gauguin landscape.
The sky filling
with a rainbow of moons
waxing
strutting -
a pungent
earthy air,
the mixed metaphors
of horny bare feet
and the lusty lemony nectars of venus.

bkb
used with permission

My Grandfather Ben

2011-06-01T17:55:00.003-05:00

The American Immigration Council announced the winner of its
14th Annual Creative Writing Contest:

From China sailed my Grandfather Ben.
He came to America when he was four plus ten.
His Guangzhou village was small and poor
And he helped his mother with farming chores.
Every morning he gathered bits of firewood
And drew water from the well as much as he could.
From morning to night he slaved like an ox.
But it was never enough to fill the rice box.
So his parents said, "You'd better leave home
And go to America where you can roam".
Until you find a great place of your own.
America, Gold Mountain, is the place to go
Big and wide, and high and low.
Everything is yes, and there are never any nos.

The complete poem is on their website here. It is well worth the read!

April is the coolest month

2011-03-31T06:48:00.009-05:00

Blustery dawn breeze
Andrea's cinnamon coffee
Yellow Iris and yawning sun

bkb
used with permission

Sometimes,

2011-03-28T09:25:00.002-05:00

I can almost grasp what it may be like to fly like a crow.

spring and all (again)

2011-03-27T05:54:00.003-05:00

April's porous earth,
fecund, awaits the amorous probe
of sprouting root.

bkb
used with permission

俳句

2011-03-27T05:16:00.003-05:00

inside the egg a pond;
its shell
a continuous shore.

damp rain soaked soil,
a pine-cone spits
a tree into the wind.

wearing top-hats of damp mud,
mushrooms
assemble in a solemn circle.

Truett Hilliard
used with permission

To Li Po from Tu Fu

2011-03-26T06:17:00.003-05:00

Milord, how beautifully you write!
May I sleep with you tonight?
Till I flag, or when thou wilt,
we'll roll up, drunken in one quilt.

In our poems we forbear
to write of kleenex or long hair
or how the one may fuck the other.
We're serious artists, aren't we, brother?

In our poems, oceans heave
like our stomachs, when we leave
late at night the 14th bar,
I your meteor, you, my star.

When autumn comes, like thistledown
we'll still be floating thru the town,
wildly singing in the haze,
I, past saving, you, past praise.

Who wrote this? Carolyn Kizer?
used with no permission

The Rapture

2011-03-25T07:13:00.001-05:00

The net is down now
that kept them one or two
to a side.
They flow between the two poles,
ragged with assurance,
and mingle
in a tattered circle:
they expect clowns and lions,
a ringmaster to entertain them.
But there are no dancing bears
and the juggling is crude.
The hoopaballoo is gone.

bkb
used with permission

Two Poems - Winter 1973

2011-03-17T07:32:00.003-05:00

For My Wife
Her body is balloon big, huffed
and puffed and growing huge.
Taut with sharing, it protrudes
into her affairs. Awkward, she is
more lovely than the long-legged crane
whose flight she admires. Her tears
are quicker now, her laugh more solemn.
For all of that, she moves
in ways a balloon moves:
a ballet of expectation.

Pairs
She sits ragged
with new maternity,
with a child at her breast,
and those four eyes
share secrets
that a father's do not.

It is a da-da grace
of housecoat and blanket,
mouth and breast:
a total communion
that invites no congregation.

Oh, I am there,
at the table with spoon and fork,
my usual self, but fragmented
by all that hunger,
that grace,
that ragtag purpose.

bkb
used with permission

Diamondback

2011-03-15T12:12:00.001-05:00

Down the back steps -
warned by the cadence of his tail
I retreat
then reappear
through the door
jerkily, an imperfect harbinger

I measure time down a smooth barrel

an infinity
of brotherhood between us
even after
there is nothing more
than shattered rubies
and grisled diamonds
scattered
among blades of grass.

bkb
used with permission

Stevens' Picasso

2011-03-14T06:59:00.004-05:00

Did you learn this in school,
this blue on blue
of blindness and guitar,

or was it what you saw
bent through your eyes:
that jangled empty sky

of fancy: that blue note
of light below
the shadow of the truth,

and was it always new,
intentional,
bending the strings to fill

our dreams with things that truly are
when played upon your blue guitar?

bkb
used with permission

Sometimes, Wandering

2011-03-08T07:19:00.003-06:00

Sometimes, wandering before dawn,
my curtains drawn against the moon,
I have bumped into you
in the long grey hall leading from my bedroom.
You stand huddled into the wall
scribbling in your yellow notebook
as though that could save you.
I wonder that you never warned us,
or was it so enormous
that I in my jerky male youthfulness never saw?
But, Love, your poetry was crude -
as your death:
you were never Sylvia Plath.
When they found you - waterlogged, nude -
that gaping hole through your head -
your parents were embarrased,
prayed loudly for your poor lost soul.
I was not so bold. Oh, I wept,
at home, at night, alone.
I slept before and after,
and only sometimes, wandering,
do I remember you at all.
Why have you not let go?
Why do you huddle and scribble
at night in my long empty hall?
Do you improve your verse?
Do they let you do that?
Sometimes, on dark mornings, I hear you in the hall -
so go to you, but you, preceptor of silence,
busy, bent to your task, ignore me.
Standing over you there in the hall,
paternal and guilty, I wonder that we never guessed
that such a fragile existence
must end abruptly.

bkb
used with permission

2011-03-03T07:19:00.002-06:00

Wind Worder
(homage to Theodore Roethke)

Sweet Sir,
master of the minimal,
to meet upon a leaf,
make tea from dew,

talk for days - you talking,
me listening finally -
not as though you were still teaching,
but mere

ly life
upon a leaf,
beneath a white stone:
a moldy earth that holds it all,

heals it all -
I, as pilgrim,
prepared for little - or much,
circling that pale stone,

you, a part of the white air,
the wormy earth,
giving,
explaining over tea

the humdrum
necessary existence - the sufficiency -
the becoming -
life

upon a yellow leaf
beneath a white stone.

bkb
used with permission

On Hearing Belatedly of a Friend's Death

2011-03-02T06:36:00.003-06:00

for Ruth Weisner

We grab death at awkward moments,
Friends a thousand miles away:
Pictures and old poems in the mail,
A posthumous volume,
Bitter sweet in its delay.

Byron's Grotto, Portovenere,
An Italian Summer,
8 August 1979,
A clipped clear photograph -
You, brown dress, brown skin, demure.

A heap of broken images,
Bits and bits of desultory things:
February 19, 1981,
Your shadow in the morning,
In the evening, the rush of wings.

bkb
used with permission

Copy of a Copy

2011-02-28T17:38:00.002-06:00

Trapped dust on a spider's web:
far northern corner of a woodshed,
I am aware of myself aware:
behind myself I see me stare
at caught dust on a spider's web.

I craft the word intuitively,
mimic madly what I see as me:
bold gift of a balding friar,
I am a universal liar
pretending dust on a spider's web.

Inside a world looking out
I know I know but know to doubt:
self-consciously I touch your face
and smile - such pursuit of grace
as patterns dust on a spider's web.

bkb
used with permission

The Geography of a Poet's Heart

2011-02-27T07:32:00.004-06:00

There is a well-worth-reading interview in the Vol. 15 , No. 1 edition of the Raven Chronicles of Peter Ludwin, mostly regarding his book, A Guest In All Your Houses by Christopher J. Jarmick.

Merry Christmas 2009 (Franz Biebl)

2009-12-24T14:48:00.001-06:00

Straight Street - Chanticleer

2009-12-24T14:44:00.000-06:00

Funeral Blues

2009-12-10T08:15:00.006-06:00

A & I recently watched the first episode of New Street Law (the series supposedly "follows the exploits and cases of two rival barristers' chambers with very different attitudes to justice") starring the Scot actor John Hannah and John Thomson. We enjoyed it.

But since we have not seen a lot of John Hannah's work, I could not erase the image of Matthew (John Hannah) reciting W.H. Auden at the funeral of his lover Gareth (Simon Callow). So there was nothing to do but to google youtube and the reading is a powerful as any I can remember - A & I were reduced to the same tears as when we first saw the movie.

between daylight and the dark

2009-12-05T19:10:00.001-06:00

black tornado - it's who i am

2009-11-28T16:43:00.001-06:00

ain't no reason

2009-11-28T16:14:00.000-06:00

what lifts love to such a peak

2009-07-07T17:19:00.002-05:00

What lifts love to such a peak as this?
-not the impetuosity of youth:
we no longer remember our first kiss -
or, in remembering, trim at the truth.

-Bill K. Boydstun

Reprinted here with permission of the author.

inch by inch

2009-07-02T17:25:00.000-05:00

gloria

2009-07-02T17:22:00.000-05:00

The Man in Motley

2009-05-28T18:08:00.003-05:00

The man in motley
dances there
up and down a tilted stair,
lightly.

He does not show
us where
(unless it is the stair)
nor why, but only how to go.

He dances lightly there,
first up, then down;
he dances in the air,
he dances on the ground.

His grace is learned,
his smile a powdered face:
he turns to counterturn,
to dance in place.

Is it enought to follow
a dancer in the air,
a motley man on a tilted stair,
no matter how he goes?

The man in motley
dances there
up and down a tilted stair,
lightly.

-Bill K. Boydstun

The Man in Motley is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

authorship redux

2009-05-27T06:41:00.002-05:00

Based on the following two sonnets, Royall Tyler is credited as the second American sonneteer. The two sonnets are found in The Spirit of the Farmers' Museum and the Lay Preacher's Gazette, Walpole, N.H., 1801, under the caption "From the Shop of Messrs. Colon & Spondee." Colon & Spondee was evidently the pseudonym used for the prose of Joseph Dennie and the poetry, chiefly satire and parody, of Royall Tyler.

On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country

And this reft house is that the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain! These rats that squeak so wild,
Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did ye not see her gleaming through the glade!
Belike, 't was she, the maiden all forlorn.
What tho' she, the maiden all forlorn.
What tho' she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet, aye, she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd;
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white;
As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full orb'd harvest moon.

Sonnet to an Old Mouser

Child of lubricious art, of sanguine sport!
Of pangful mirth! sweet ermin'd sprite!
Who lov'st, with silent, velvet step, to court
The bashful bosom of the night.
Whose elfin eyes can pierce night's sable gloom,
And witch her fairy prey with guile,
Who sports fell frolic o'er the grisly tomb,
And gracest death with dimpling smile!
Daughter of ireful mirth, sportive in rage,
Whose joy should shine in sculptur'd bas relief
Like Patience, in rapt Shakespeare's deathless page,
Smiling in marble at wan grief.
Oh, come, and teach me all thy barb'rous joy,
To sport with sorrow first, and then destroy.

It seems doubtful that Royall Tyler is really the author of the first of these two sonnets.

Here is Coleridge's accompanying note when he republished his poem "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country" in his Biographia Literaria:

Under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious. The second was on low creeping language and thoughts under the pretence of simplicity. The third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. ... So general at the time and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style that a celebrated physician (now alas ! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman who was about to meet me at a dinner-party could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention The House that Jack Built in my presence, for that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet, he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.

Here is Royall Tyler's introduction to his two sonnets published in The Spirit of the Farmers' Museum and the Lay Preacher's Gazette:

The plaintive and affected style of Charlotte Smith is familiar, it is supposed, to most readers. Criticism has frowned upon the verbose grief of a sobbing poetess. . . . We insert the following as a pleasant introduction to an attack soon to be made upon the above sighing sonneteer from the Shop of Colon and Spondee.

They are evidently talking about the same sonnet ("On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country").

If you google "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country" you will find the poem listed and talked about several places, most often as a Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem but sometimes as a Royall Tyler poem. For instance here and here.

A Guest in All Your Houses

2009-05-26T06:47:00.006-05:00

Peter Ludwin’s new book of poems, A Guest in All Your Houses, is now available from Word Walker Press and, shortly, from Amazon.com.

A good review of the book is online here.

I've just finished reading the book and expect to do a review shortly. Clue to review: it's a terrific collection of poems covering the geography of much of my own earlier peripatetic musings.

If you'll be in the Seattle area, I see online that Peter will be reading from his book on Thursday, May 28 at 7:30 p.m. at Open Books, 2414 N 45th St., Seattle.

in memoriam

2009-05-24T08:42:00.001-05:00

I salute our brothers and sisters in uniform and will light a special candle tomorrow for those who lost their lives while serving in the armed forces of the United States of America. This is doubtless not different from what most American will be thinking tomorrow. I take a certain pride, as an American veteran, that we recognize those who put themselves at risk for all of us.

Dulce et Decorum est

2009-05-24T08:17:00.003-05:00

-Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Diamondback

2009-05-23T06:23:00.001-05:00

Down the back steps -
warned by the cadence of his tail
I retreat
then reappear
through the door
jerkily, an imperfect harbinger

I measure time down a smooth barrel

an infinity
of brotherhood between us
even after
there is nothing more
than shattered rubies
and grisled diamonds
scattered
among blades of grass.

-Bill K. Boydstun

Diamondback is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

3 tenors

2009-05-23T06:19:00.000-05:00

are old jokes best?

2009-05-18T17:57:00.003-05:00

I've been reading reviews of the new Star Trek for a couple of weeks. I thought Lance Mannion's "Not my review . . . " was the best of the lot. Informative, critical, supportive of some of the basic concepts of the original; it was 'top of the heap" - and it may be yet . . . but (there it is, the big BUT), I must confess to being completely bowled over by (Anthony Lane's) the Highly Illogical review in The New Yorker's current edition (turns out, it is also online). Read them both - compare them - these are two reviewers with (axes to grind, perhaps) no guile, allowing that some of us have finite resources (and choices to be made) in our approach to possibilities of infinity.

I wish I could sit down, sharing a pitcher of St. Arnold's wheat ale, and discuss Mr. Lane's take on the exhaustion "for comic value" of Dickens' "The Pickwick Papers" with Mr. Mannion.

On an Excess of Passion

2009-05-16T19:51:00.007-05:00

We strummed so many strings
and sang so many songs

that I've forgotten
what we may have meant.

Rosehip tea
to an afternoon.

(Promises
of seaweed.)

We must have said
"thank-you for the tea" etc

or "you have nice eyes" etc
but I remember nothing.

No moon
to break and reshape

on the waters near the shore.
No silver swan

to sing the silence.
Only tea and seaweed:

an evening of strings
and butterfly wings.

-Bill K. Boydstun

On an Excess of Passion is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

Juan Diego Florez - La donna e mobile

2009-05-15T06:28:00.000-05:00

Stevens' Picasso

2009-05-14T21:03:00.004-05:00

Did you learn this in school,
this blue on blue
of blindness and guitar,

or was it what you saw
bent through your eyes:
that jangled empty sky

of fancy: that blue note
of light below
the shadow of the truth,

and was it always new,
intentional,
bending the strings to fill

our dreams with things that truly are
when played upon your blue guitar?

-Bill K. Boydstun

Stevens' Picasso is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in First Harvest.

La Donna È Mobile Redux

2009-05-11T21:13:00.001-05:00

poem

2009-05-06T20:23:00.003-05:00

On Hearing Belatedly of a Friends Death
for Ruth Weisner

We grab death at awkward moments,
our friends a thousand miles away:
pictures and old poems in the mail,
a posthumous volume,
bitter sweet in its delay.

Byron's Grotto, Portovenere,
an Italian Summer,
8 August 1979,
a clipped clear photograph -
you, brown dress, brown skin, demure.

A heap of broken images,
bits and bits of desultory things:
February 19, 1981,
your shadow in the morning,
in the evening, the rush of wings.

-Bill Boydstun

how i used to be

2009-05-02T21:11:00.000-05:00

Elegy

2009-05-02T06:21:00.008-05:00

We talked before: she knew
how to construct rainbows -
bits of bible and super-glue:
she had God by the big toe.

Her plaster mask so clean, pure -
the sun has not triumphed here:
one side in shade, the other obscure:
the moon limp as a hound's ear.

Dismiss these scattered dreams -
who can decipher the voices of trees?
such namby noises as they seem:
embrace the stinging sea.

She culled bells in her mouth,
hard vapored sounds of youth -
mockingbirds portending truth:
crystal wings whispered south.

We talked after: as cool as stone -
"It's hard. I can't come back again."
She bent, cupped the baby's chin,
smiled, and was slowly gone.

-Bill Boydstun

Elegy is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in The Sandstorm, the literary journal of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

10 things I hate about you

2009-05-01T20:10:00.001-05:00

poem

2009-04-30T03:16:00.006-05:00

Sometimes a poem you've read before, like a person you may have briefly met at some crowded party, shows up alone and suddenly the conversation becomes more intimate and, with a little serendipity, a friendship is born. So it was with me and this poem. Peter has graciously allowed me to share it with you:

A Chance Encounter
-Peter Ludwin
Because she had once married a Greek
because I'd traveled to Greece in the '60s
because we were visiting a mutual friend
on the Upper West Side,
we had this conversation.
And though I protested when she sat down
that I had to get some sleep
she insisted on just one small glass of wine.
Which became two and then three
as we agreed that where Kazantzakis was transcendent,
Sartre was empty and Hemingway merely small.
Her hands spoke passion,
as if releasing flocks of doves into her voice,
a soft liquer blend of European Texas
that drew me into that old yearning
for the expatriate life,
for garnet angels
and mandolins raining down
on Russia
and I thought yes,
there's that chorus in the blood,
the one that's attended all our births:
to track the minotaur,
the iron tyranny of THINGS,
to find it and destroy it with the dance,
with epiphanies of water,
swinging up onto its head
like a naked acrobat
as the light pours in from the sea.

© Peter Ludwin

A Chance Encounter is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in 1996 in Lullwater Review, the literary journal of Emory University in Atlanta.

Peter’s new book of poems, A Guest in All Your Houses, is now available from Word Walker Press and, shortly, from Amazon.com.

poem

2009-04-28T17:56:00.009-05:00

A History of Horses

She was once
horses across sand dunes,
sack lunches in the hills above Isleta:
brown as Indian bread,
lively as a new moon,
she was not twenty.

They counted stars,
stirred the warming sands,
awoke with Spring wind. Cocoa and cream:
swirling night into noon.
Only the horses knew
the way they had come.

Now,
she is twice a wife,
three times a mother. Her rosary beads
are worn smooth. The nights
parade without horses:
she does not remember how long.

T.L. Lachlan

A History of Horses is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in 1985 in The Sandstorm, the literary journal of the University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

beatb0x

2009-04-24T20:38:00.000-05:00

I'm here for the long haul , , , and so is Texas

2009-04-18T06:55:00.003-05:00

Here is a link to the lyrics of Lee Greenwood’s God Bless The USA as posted at a Boy Scouts songbook web page.

Thanks to Texas Liberal:

If tomorrow all the things were gone,
I’d worked for all my life.
And I had to start again,
with just my children and my wife.

I’d thank my lucky stars,
to be livin here today.
‘Cause the flag still stands for freedom,
and they can’t take that away.

That’s right!

Below is a picture of the President of the United States. We were told so often after September 11 how we should rally around our President during a time of crisis. We are now in an economic crisis as bad as any we have faced since the Great Depression.

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T05:53:00.002-05:00

Cherry Blossom Under the Moon
a painting by Soojung Cho

national poetry month

2009-04-09T20:35:00.003-05:00

A reminder that April is National Poetry Month!!!!!

A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Robert Frost

A poem is never finished, only abandoned. Paul Valery

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself. E. M. Forster

A poet can survive everything but a misprint. Oscar Wilde

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language. W. H. Auden

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman. Wallace Stevens

A poet must leave traces of his passage, not proof. Rene Char

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote. Yevgeny Yevtushenko

A poet's work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep. Salman Rushdie

And more from La Bloga.

chalice spark: Slicing Potatoes

2009-04-09T18:03:00.001-05:00

chalice spark: Slicing Potatoes

Not much is known about Rabia al Basri

I am fully qualified to work as a doorkeeper, and for this reason:
What is inside me, I don't let out:
What is outside me, I don't let in.
If someone comes in, he goes right out again.
He has nothing to do with me at all.
I am a Doorkeeper of the Heart, not a lump of wet clay.

a USASA mentor

2009-04-08T20:56:00.002-05:00

One of my mentors:
Voorheis does Dylan:

Monkey Mind: Marking the Buddha's Birth

2009-04-08T06:51:00.001-05:00

Monkey Mind: Marking the Buddha's Birth

poem

2009-04-03T21:05:00.003-05:00

Wind Worder

Sweet Sir,
master of the minimal,
to meet upon a leaf,
make tea from dew,

talk for days -- you talking,
me listening finally --
not as though you were still teaching,
but mere

ly life
upon a leaf
beneath a stone:
a moldy earth that holds it all,

heals it all --
I, as pilgrim,
prepared for little --
circling that pale stone,

you, a part of the white air,
the wormy earth,
giving,
explaining over tea

the humdrum
necessary existence -- the sufficiency --
the becoming --
life

upon a yellow leaf
beneath a white stone.

© Bill Boydstun

april is the coolest month . . .

2009-04-02T18:19:00.003-05:00

From poets.org:

Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture. Thousands of businesses and non-profit organizations participate through readings, festivals, book displays, workshops, and other events.

Update: What world do I inhabit? A good question, perhaps, but beside the point: I had thought my little pun on cruelest month was original . . . Ha! . . . double Ha! . . . it's all over the Internet . . . perhaps my favorite (of the sites visited) is this: larrylivermore.com from a year ago.

poem

2009-03-31T21:13:00.003-05:00

On the Commitment of a Poet, Eighteen Years Old
for Barbara

If we had known the depths of your quiet,
Or looked at eyes as often as at words,
We might have quelled the silent slow riot
Behind your eyes' cage full of fallen birds.
We did not hear the keen of crumpled wing,
That sudden low departure. Only you
Could see the Sparrows' last great try to cling
To air that was no longer clear nor blue.

And now you hold your song in muted stead,
In sterile room of tall blank walls of white,
Where no one comes or goes, but some are led.
You move as moved but sing in us at night.
We say your words, the razored edge is gone:
We say the words, we cannot sing the song.

© Bill Boydstun

texas poetry

2009-03-24T18:44:00.001-05:00

dylan and griffith

2009-03-24T18:41:00.001-05:00

poem from Peter Ludwin

2009-03-20T12:27:00.008-05:00

The poem I found on the Internet and posted a few days ago was an early version of a now published poem:

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868
-Peter Ludwin
What really got us in the end--
we women who didn't make it,
who withered and blew away in the open--
was the wind. Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced?? Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried. Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

© Peter Ludwin

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868 is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in South Dakota Review and can be found in Peter's just published collection, A Guest in All Your Houses.

The book is available from Word Walker Press or, in a few weeks, from Amazon.

Peter Ludwin’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, most prominently The Antietam Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Coal City Review, Illya's Honey, Karumu, Hurricane Review, Lullwater Review, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Raven Chronicles, Lake Effect, Small Pond Magazine of Literature, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review and Whiskey Island Magazine.

my offering for St. Patrick's day

2009-03-17T20:03:00.006-05:00

Brown Penny
-William Butler Yeats

I whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Lucky Irishman that I am, I love my wife (and she-of-the-clover loves me).

Update: here's something found online at MEaning of WB YEats Brown penny

Yeats is one of the most important English language poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and yet he is not typical of the period. Most poets in the language were moving toward free verse, but Yeats took a very traditionalist view of how poetry ought to be learned. The tradition of the ancient Irish was that to be a bard, a singer of verse, one had first to master all of the verse forms known to bards, and go into the wild places, living from hand to mouth, exposed to elements, to truly feel nature and to compose from one's feelings.

Yeats grew up in a wildly beautiful part of the Island, in County Mayo, and rambled there and in County Sligo. At one time, as a young man, he did ramble about the countryside in all weather, composing verse aloud as he sat beneath the dripping bush.

Brown Penny is not the work of the young Yeats, however--he wrote it in middle age. But as he grew older, he wrote more austere, more sparse verse, and became even more dedicated to verse form and traditional rhyming. In that respect, he moved farther from the poets of his generation.

Brown Penny is about love, and the welter of emotions which it engenders in the young man's heart. Joy, dismay, fear, wonder, doubt--and he has woven all of those into this brief poem. The old penny of the United Kingdom was a large brown coin, and had symbolic meaning to the common folk. One of those meanings was love, that love was something priceless, to which no mere material value could be attached. Although not understood today, that symbolism survives in the expression "a penny for your thoughts," which originally was used to indicate to the person spoken to that deep emotion motivated the question.

Brown Penny should be viewed as a song more than a poem, and a whirling dance of a song at that. Imagine the poet so immersed in his love and the conflicting emotional responses to which it gives rise, whirling in a dance, a reel, in which he is "looped" in the hair of his lover, both literally and fiburatively, and wrapped ever more securely in the emotions which have gripped him. If you can, sing the poem to yourself, and think of the twirling Irish dance known as the reel. It is quite a marvelous work of poetry, and very much in the ancient Irish spirit of acheiving freedom within the bounds of form.

That seems pretty much to the point.

mining for gold

2009-03-16T18:09:00.002-05:00

A poem found on the Internet, a poem written by a former army buddy, room-mate, friend, and confidant:

GREAT PLAINS, A FRAME OF REFERENCE

What really got them in the end—
those women who didn’t make it,
who withered and blew away
in the open—was the wind.
Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors,
a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In pained letters
you hear it
shriek hysteria from sod huts,
unutterable loneliness that boiled
up off the horizon
and sucked dry their desire
as it flattened the stubborn grasses.

You turn then to photographs
that confirm
the contents of the letters:
bony wives in plain black dresses,
prematurely undone, adrift,
betrayal like accusation
leaking from rudderless eyes.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Indians,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,
not event a purpose one could name.

The Cheyenne, at home
with the wind from birth,
had no pianos.

© 2005 Peter Ludwin

The Road Not Taken

2009-03-15T20:19:00.001-05:00

by Robert Frost

a recommendation . . .

2009-03-15T16:37:00.002-05:00

Iddybud Journal.

A Feature Documentary by Simon El Habre

Semaan is a farmer leading a quiet life, in the small village of Aïn El Halazoun, in the Lebanese mountains. He wakes up at the crack of dawn, tends to his cows and other animals and prepares the produce he will sell at the market

During the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), Aïn el Halazoun was completely destroyed and eventually deserted. Its original inhabitants, all from the El Habre family, regularly go back to the village to visit their houses and cultivate their plots of land, but they always leave before sunset.

By observing life in a quasi ghost village, the film reflects upon collective and individual memory, in a country whose inhabitants seem unwilling to learn from their past, even while on the brink of a new civil war.

notes on sonnets . . . 3

2009-03-13T16:58:00.007-05:00

The first two 'notes on sonnets' are here and here and a related entry is here.

The Petrarchan rhyme (abba abba cde cde - the ending sestet was also sometimes cddcdd or cdcdcd), while beautiful in Italian with its richness of vowel endings, has not been as successful for poets writing in English. Many early critics insisted that the Italian model was the only true sonnet, while later critics, some with linguistic chauvinism, have thought the English sonnet both more flexible and less artificial than its Italian cousin. English is a difficult language to carry an extended rhyme sound, though of course Robert Frost did so with tremendous effect in "Design" with its abbaabba acaacc rhyme pattern:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth --
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth --
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

Nonetheless, the repeating of rhyme in English most often sounds humorous rather than achieving the somewhat philosophic tone achieved by the master craftsman, Frost. Through this reasoning, many modern poets, as mentioned earlier, have either written their sonnets in blank verse, or throwing off even the iambic pentameter, with little or not metrical design. Kenneth Pitchford's "Homosexual Sonnets" might not be called sonnets at all if he had not so labeled them. They are not decasyllabic, they do not rhyme, but they do have the requisite 14-line structure, and when more closely examined, in my opinion, they also can be seen to possess five primary accents per line. Scan the following Kenneth Pitchford sonnet:

Bob, nothing in me wants to tell you again
about those seven years - we in our twenties,
a poet and a pianist, both in our first passionate sexual
physically satisfied love affair, but I never fail

to remember seeing your spotlit face brooding over
a Brahms intermezzo late at night in a deserted building
as my weekend pass rant out and I had to get back
to my infantry rifle company at Fort Lewis.

In the spring you took me to the Seattle Arboretum
so that I would learn the names of trees and plants, both
exotic and ordinary, and it began to rain and everyone left
but I kissed your wet lips, our clothes drenched, discarded,
before we escaped home to our attic, leaning against the warm chimney
for a dozen naked hours of coming and coming.

While some of the accept marks may seen arbitrary, the poem is generally east to read as five main beats to a line. Adding to the sonnet's effectiveness is the full stop at the end of the second quatrain, echoing its heritage.

Other recent and contemporary poems labeled as sonnets are more difficult to accept because of their lack of sonnet characteristics. Robert Duncan's "Sonnet I" is lyrical but has no historical sonnet traits (if you see one/some, please point it out), unless obliquely we accept the fact of Dante's name in the poem as a connection.

More later . . .

anne bradstreet

2009-03-12T20:38:00.002-05:00

Okay, I agree, any American poetry blog, so-called or real, must pay tribute early on to Anne Bradstreet, our first authentic American poet. I'm more than willing . . .

Ms Bradstreet, the floor is yours . . .

To My Dear and Loving Husband
A poem by Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were lov'd by wife, then thee.
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that Rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompetence.
Thy love is such I can no way repay.
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

thinking about gregory corso . . .

2009-03-11T18:36:00.010-05:00

The Whole Mess ... Almost

I ran up six flights of stairs
to my small furnished room
opened the window
and began throwing out
those things most important in life

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:
"Don't! I'll tell awful things about you!"
"Oh yeah? Well, I've nothing to hide ... OUT!"
Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement:
"It's not my fault! I'm not the cause of it all!" "OUT!"
Then Love, cooing bribes: "You'll never know impotency!
All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!"
I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:
"You always end up a bummer!"
I picked up Faith Hope Charity
all three clinging together:
"Without us you'll surely die!"
"With you I'm going nuts! Goodbye!"

Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty --
As I led her to the window
I told her: "You I loved best in life
... but you're a killer; Beauty kills!"
Not really meaning to drop her
I immediately ran downstairs
getting there just in time to catch her
"You saved me!" she cried
I put her down and told her: "Move on."

Went back up those six flights
went to the money
there was no money to throw out.
The only thing left in the room was Death
hiding beneath the kitchen sink:
"I'm not real!" It cried
"I'm just a rumor spread by life ..."
Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all
and suddenly realized Humor
was all that was left --
All I could do with Humor was to say:
"Out the window with the window!"

On the 'net from Robert Creeley:

Gregory Corso, 1930-2001
by Robert Creeley

Gregory Corso died last night (January 17), happily in his sleep in Minnesota. He had been ill for much of the past year but had recovered from time to time, saying that he'd got to the classic river but lacked the coin for Charon to carry him over. So he just dipped his toes in the water.

In this time his daughter Sherry, a nurse, had been a godsend to him, securing him, steadying the ambiance, just minding the store with great love and clarity. He thought she should get Nurse of the Year recognition at the very least.

There's no simple generalization to make of Gregory's life or poetry. There are all too many ways to displace the extraordinary presence and authority he was fact of. Last time we talked, he made the useful point that only a poet could say he or she was a poet -- only they knew. Whereas a philosopher, for instance, needed some other to say that that was what he or she was -- un(e) philosophe! -- poets themselves had to recognize and initiate their own condition.

One of the so-called "beat poets" - some of his verse is special. I don't know why he came to mind tonight...perhaps his poem about 'should i get married'...it was an early model for my own attempts. Gregory, we hardly had a chance to know ya.

e.e.. cummings

2009-03-10T20:18:00.004-05:00

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
wich is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

love's austere and lonely office . . .

2009-03-10T20:18:00.000-05:00

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert E. Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

quarrel with ourselves . . .

2009-03-10T20:17:00.001-05:00

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry. ~William Butler Yeats

travels around the the poetry web

2009-03-10T17:42:00.010-05:00

All animals are equal...pigs are more equal than other animals. All poetry postings have merit (this is actually a tactful lie)...some poetry postings are more fun and meritorious than others.

copyrighting poetry

2009-03-09T06:35:00.004-05:00

The U.S. Copyright Office has information on copyrighting poems online.

Spring and All

2009-03-08T20:09:00.005-05:00

by William Carlos Williams

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast—a cold wind. Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines—

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches—

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter. All about them
the cold, familiar wind—

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf

One by one objects are defined—
It quickens: clarity, outline of leaf

But now the stark dignity of
entrance—Still, the profound change
has come upon them: rooted they
grip down and begin to awaken

Walking today, this poem refrained in my mind over and over . . . not in its entirety, I struggle to remember some of its wonderful imagery, but in its essence, its sense of sound. Or, perhaps more, in its "concentrated mind."

Here, in the beginning of March, with winds on the bayou, already signs of sluggish, dazed spring approaching..." The signs of spring are not now flamboyant as they shortly will be, but all the same, the news of this new dawning is as certain as any clarion call from past years.

introductions . . .

2009-03-08T13:31:00.003-05:00

This book was undertaken in the belief that poetry is best discovered through the careful reading of a few good poems. Poetry is seldom read with the attention it requires. It requires a concentrated mind, a generous imagination, and a listening ear. The self-respecting poet is no waster of words; he moves as swiftly and directly as he can toward the end, whatever it may be, that he has in view. But this end is with him from the first. It is not the last sentence he will write; it is the whole purpose and effect of the words he puts together as he thinks and feels his way along, and as he considers the sound his syllables make. He also has a concentrated mind, a generous imagination, and a listening ear. A poem exists only when its writer and its reader meet inside of it and conspire to ignore everything save what it says.

This is from Mark Van Doren's preface to his 1951 Introduction to Poetry, an early and most wonderful discovery as I first delved into poetry and was trying to grasp hold of an understanding of "self-respecting" poets. I suppose it is no longer in print, but, if you come across a copy, buy it or borrow it, as the case may be.

lovers' sonnet

2009-03-06T20:59:00.002-06:00

ROMEO
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET
Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO
Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET
Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO
O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET
Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO
Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

[Kisses her.]

I, Lord Montague, am offstage, both moved and reproaching.

our unitarian brother . . .

2009-03-06T20:39:00.000-06:00

it is at moments after i have dreamed
of the rare entertainment of your eyes,
when (being fool to fancy) i have deemed

with your peculiar mouth my heart made wise;
at moments when the glassy darkness holds

the genuine apparition of your smile
(it was through tears always) and silence moulds
such strangeness as was mine a little while;

moments when my once more illustrious arms
are filled with fascination, when my breast
wears the intolerant brightness of your charms:

one pierced moment whiter than the rest

--turning from the tremendous lie of sleep
i watch the roses of the day grow deep.

e.e. cummings,
Poems, 1923-1954

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2009-03-06T07:48:00.005-06:00

Here is Coleridge's accompanying note when he republished his poem "On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country" in his Biographia Literaria:

Under the name of Nehemiah Higginbottom I contributed three sonnets, the first of which had for its object to excite a good-natured laugh at the spirit of doleful egotism and at the recurrence of favourite phrases, with the double defect of being at once trite and licentious. The second was on low creeping language and thoughts under the pretence of simplicity. The third, the phrases of which were borrowed entirely from my own poems, on the indiscriminate use of elaborate and swelling language and imagery. ... So general at the time and so decided was the opinion concerning the characteristic vices of my style that a celebrated physician (now alas ! no more) speaking of me in other respects with his usual kindness to a gentleman who was about to meet me at a dinner-party could not, however, resist giving him a hint not to mention The House that Jack Built in my presence, for that I was as sore as a boil about that sonnet, he not knowing that I was myself the author of it.

Here is Royall Tyler's introduction to his two sonnets published in The Spirit of the Farmers' Museum and the Lay Preacher's Gazette:

The plaintive and affected style of Charlotte Smith is familiar, it is supposed, to most readers. Criticism has frowned upon the verbose grief of a sobbing poetess. . . . We insert the following as a pleasant introduction to an attack soon to be made upon the above sighing sonneteer from the Shop of Colon and Spondee.

They are evidently talking about the same sonnet ("On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country").

second published American sonnet

2009-03-06T07:23:00.003-06:00

On a Ruined House in a Romantic Country

And this reft house is that the which he built,
Lamented Jack! and here his malt he pil'd,
Cautious in vain! These rats that squeak so wild,
Squeak, not unconscious of their father's guilt.
Did ye not see her gleaming through the glade!
Belike, 't was she, the maiden all forlorn.
What tho' she, the maiden all forlorn.
What tho' she milk no cow with crumpled horn,
Yet, aye, she haunts the dale where erst she stray'd;
And aye, beside her stalks her amorous knight!
Still on his thighs their wonted brogues are worn,
And thro' those brogues, still tatter'd and betorn,
His hindward charms gleam an unearthly white;
As when thro' broken clouds at night's high noon
Peeps in fair fragments forth the full orb'd harvest moon.

Sonnet to an Old Mouser

Child of lubricious art, of sanguine sport!
Of pangful mirth! sweet ermin'd sprite!
Who lov'st, with silent, velvet step, to court
The bashful bosom of the night.
Whose elfin eyes can pierce night's sable gloom,
And witch her fairy prey with guile,
Who sports fell frolic o'er the grisly tomb,
And gracest death with dimpling smile!
Daughter of ireful mirth, sportive in rage,
Whose joy should shine in sculptur'd bas relief
Like Patience, in rapt Shakespeare's deathless page,
Smiling in marble at wan grief.
Oh, come, and teach me all thy barb'rous joy,
To sport with sorrow first, and then destroy.

I will have more about this later but I doubt that Royall Tyler is the author of the first of these two sonnets.

notes on sonnets . . . 2

2009-03-05T17:27:00.007-06:00

The first American sonnet is credited to Colonel David Humphreys (1752-1818), a Yale graduate, and in 1780, an aide-de-camp to General George Washington. Examples of his sonnets are here.

Royall Tyler, author of The Contrast, evidently the first (or some say the second) American play (a comedy) performed in public by professional actors, was the next native American sonneteer, though with a far different approach to the ancient form than that taken by Col. Humphreys:

Sonnet to an Old Mouser

Child of lubricious art, of sanguine sport!
Of pangful mirth! sweet ermin'd sprite!
Who lov'st, with silent, velvet step, to court
The bashful bosom of the night.
Whose elfin eyes can pierce night's sable gloom,
And witch her fairy prey with guile,
Who sports fell frolic o'er the grisly tomb,
And gracest death with dimpling smile!
Daughter of ireful mirth, sportive in rage,
Whose joy should shine in sculptur'd bas relief
Like Patience, in rapt Shakespeare's deathless page,
Smiling in marble at wan grief.
Oh, come, and teach me all thy barb'rous joy,
To sport with sorrow first, and then destroy.

The original Italian sonnets had either the rhyme scheme abababab cdecde or abbaabba cde cde, sometimes with the final sestet modified either cdedce or cdcdcd. Whatever the rhyming custom followed, the poem was extremely formal in its structure. There was always a full stop between the octave and the sestet, a custom carried over into the English sonnet and thought immutable until Milton carried a single thought or emotion through his sonnets without the historical break between octave and sestet.

Before the sonnet became fully anglicized and set in its conventional 14-line iambic pentameter with the abab-cdcd-efef-gg rhyme pattern, Sidney wrote many sonnets in hexameters (i.e. "Loving in truth, and fair in verse my love to show,) and Shakespeare wrote an octosyllabic sonnet ("Those lips that Love's own hand did make"). Poets throughout the sonnet's history, have played with the sacrosanct laws of the sonnet. Poe's "Sonnet-Silence" is fifteen lines long; Edwin Honig's "For an Immigrant Grandmother" is written in iambic heptameter; Robert Hayden's "Frederick Douglas", William Bronk's "The Mask The Wearer of the Mask Wears", and Daryl Hine's "August 13, 1966" are all written in blank verse; Frank Sidgwick's "Aeronaut to His Lady" is written in monometer:

An Aeronaut to His Lady

I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?

Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.

Perhaps the only way to define the modern sonnet is by looking at each possible sonnet individually to ascertain its author's intent. Sidgwick's poem would not be, and is not, classified as a sonnet by strict definition, but surely such a structured poem, though deceptively simple-appearing, was intended by its writer to be a sonnet. Even the old octave-sestet division is formally met, and the rhyme pattern is based on an ancient Italian model.

More later. . .

interlude . . . an actual sonnet

2009-03-04T21:58:00.000-06:00

by: Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

BEING born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast,--
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however,--the poor treason
Of my stout blood against your staggering brain--
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity; let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again

notes on sonnets . . .

2009-03-04T20:58:00.004-06:00

Okay, the original idea of the site is to discuss poetry, not only share poetry. But, before going forward, the sharing of poetry in and of itself is a blessed, worthwhile expenditure of our time.

The well-made sonnet probably allows its creator, novice or sonneteer, greater self-pleasure than any other lyric form. The sonnet's complexity of form, its aesthetic possibilities, and its long, illustrious history all connect the poet (or would-be poet) of today with almost every major poet of the past 750+ years.

Some history of sorts: the sonnet originated in Italy around 1235 (you want something more exact... you might try Wikipedia....[no link here, I'm on a roll...of sorts...but let tomorrow judge]). The two earliest writers of the form were Giacomo da Lentino and Guittone di Arezzo, who is sometimes given this inestimable credit without mention of Giacomo.

After its invention, the decasyllabic line, and fourteen-line length of the poem became set (after a fashion). Certainly we can all agree that the lyric was enriched through the skill of Dante (1265-1321), and the popularization of Petrarch (1304-1374), whose name became interchangeable with "Italian" in describing these early sonnets.

The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet was brought to England through translations and adaptations in the 1530's by Sir Thomas Wyatt, and became English in form through liberal translations and creativity of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey.

The sonnet did not become popular in England until Sir Phillip Sidney and William Sharespeare, writing in the late sixteenth century, published their first works. Later, John Donne (luv ya guy) and John Milton (not so much, johnny) extended the scope of the sonnet in their experiments, and their influence, most especially the influence of (the less love-able) Milton, is felt by sonnet writers to the present day.

We return tomorrow with a 2nd note . . .

One's-Self I Sing

2009-03-04T17:58:00.003-06:00

A poem by Walt Whitman

One's-self I sing—a simple, separate Person;
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-masse.

Of Physiology from top to toe I sing;
Not physiognomy alone, nor brain alone, is worthy for the muse—I say the
Form complete is worthier far;
The Female equally with the male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,
Cheerful—for freest action form’d, under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

double your pleasure . . .

2009-03-03T20:13:00.001-06:00

Epidermal Macabre

Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes, --
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost.

The Geranium

When I put her out, once, by the garbage pail,
She looked so limp and bedraggled,
So foolish and trusting, like a sick poodle,
Or a wizened aster in late September,
I brought her back in again
For a new routine--
Vitamins, water, and whatever
Sustenance seemed sensible
At the time: she'd lived
So long on gin, bobbie pins, half-smoked cigars, dead beer,
Her shriveled petals falling
On the faded carpet, the stale
Steak grease stuck to her fuzzy leaves.
(Dried-out, she creaked like a tulip.)
The things she endured!--
The dumb dames shrieking half the night
Or the two of us, alone, both seedy,
Me breathing booze at her,
She leaning out of her pot toward the window.
Near the end, she seemed almost to hear me--
And that was scary--
So when that snuffling cretin of a maid
Threw her, pot and all, into the trash-can,
I said nothing.
But I sacked the presumptuous hag the next week,
I was that lonely.

Two by Theodore Roethke, the godfather of my own poetic endeavors...........

a favorite poet

2009-03-02T04:10:00.001-06:00

My Dad's favorite poet was Robert Service and, based on how often he quoted from it, his favorite poem was "The Cremation of Sam McGee":

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam 'round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he'd often say in his homely way that "he'd sooner live in hell."
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka's fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we'd close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn't see;
It wasn't much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o'erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and "Cap," says he, "I'll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I'm asking that you won't refuse my last request."
Well, he seemed so low that I couldn't say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
"It's the cursèd cold, and it's got right hold, till I'm chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet 'tain't being dead — it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you'll cremate my last remains."
A pal's last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.
There wasn't a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn't get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say: "You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it's up to you, to cremate those last remains."
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows — Oh God! how I loathed the thing.
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I'd often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.
Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the "Alice May."
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then "Here," said I, with a sudden cry, "is my cre-ma-tor-eum."
Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared — such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.
Then I made a hike, for I didn't like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don't know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.
I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.
I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and said: "Please close that door.
It's fine in here, but I greatly fear, you'll let in the cold and storm —
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

my shadow

2009-03-01T07:17:00.000-06:00

The first poem I remember reading was Robert Louis Stevenson's "Little Shadow"

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

And, of course, when I had a puppy, we named her My Shadow.

As a child, the poem was fanciful and fun and caused me to experiment with light to shorten and elongate my shadow. As an adult, I see that we all carry shadows about of varying lengths and history and that shadows can have meanings beyond the pure mark of sunshine.