Desktop survey sees: no wonder my brain feels full. Wonder about just listing, or listing and excerpting for value added reading, or also commenting on why I like or respond how I do, but then we’re kicking it into another energy level and time-commitment.
Jackpine Sonnets by Milton Acorn (Steel Rail Publishing, 1977). What struck me about those shared at Purdyfest and in this and the other collection I read was how energetic his words are, standing alert against the drone that is most attempting to be beautiful poetry. It is not that he is raw chaos. The words are controlled to create an effect. He crafts stories and uses language as a tool in the way of poetry rather than prose. I didn’t expect this message from him. p. 80
Pigs
Truck’s painted red, sun yellow, pigs quite pink
From sunburn – I wouldn’t be suprised:
It being precious little they get
Of wind and sun. Now here’s this jolly trip.
Never mind . . They don’t feel burnt yet
And never will – the way things are set.
So far they’ve been well kept by the man;
Confined but otherwise done much good by
Nourishing meals, delivered right on time.
Now comes this surprise. . . A word to scan
While they zip through it. There’s another sky
Higher and brighter than above their pen.
Filling their eyes with nearness and distance;
Two of them stand up, almost like men –
Balancing by forelegs on top of the cab;
Like the Cabot Brothers, gazing wide ahead.
It’s for this they were bred, born, doctored, fed.
Newest in:
Farewell to Coney Island by David Blaikie (Tree Press, 2012). It also struck me as exceptionally articulate. Even with a limited chance to hear how his voice falls in person, the cadence comes thru in the bare page. The steps are measured and yet dense. He works a line and moves a story forward, not in the usual barren-sketches of plundering Mount Olympus for some personal life molehill as so many poets do. There’s a tether to details of particulars of time and place without it losing focus and becoming about the details. There’s substance paired with word dexterity that sent me straight for a re-read of the whole. p 15 of our prison system in Canada.
Men in Orange
They are not men but ghosts in orange with surly
mouths and cornered eyes, shuffling in sixes to
the tune of guard boots down corridors that go
nowhere forever and ever in this world without end
amen, ah men without world such as men are made
by Canada in this 21st century of our lord, here in this
great white north of born-again government
and human rights for all except the right to be
human behind these walls.
I see them come, I see them go when the hour is done
and ponder the sadism of identical orange, this vulgar
brew of red and yellow, red for ritual election anger
yellow for the cowardice of penal politics in these
pious poisoned times. There is nothing here
but the nothingness of two and three and four to
a cell, eight by eight by twleve feet long, bad feel,
bad words, bad dreams, the sweat, the heat
the stench of animals shitting microwaved food
down foul steel toilets and never a glimpse of sun
or an honest inch of air. Beasts live better than this.
Light glare and cameras starre, doors whir and click
and clank. Some nights I almost run when it’s time to
go, guilty for washing my hands, guilty for noticing
how the moonlight falls on the razor wire.
I have to love a poem that spins a hymn into a sentence. And that Canada keeps its capitalization and yet lord becomes lowercase. There’s something of a little subversive pleasure there. The line breaks pull it forward and yet it is heavy reading and those spaces act as breaks to parse all that has come before before plunging ahead. It builds up so that the ‘pious poisoned times’ comes out as a spit of vehemence.
It talks about issues that matter which I appreciate in a poem or communication. It ends with a complex mood and simple image that steps to transcendent.
The Collected Poems by Stanley Kuntiz (Norton, 2000). I’ve read about 200 of the 280-odd pages. As a twenty-something he wrote some incisive poems but in his 60s he was not riding his past glories but continuing to work that craft. In 1971 he published this, reproduced from p. 187
The Knot
I’ve tried to seal it in,
that cross-grained knot
on the opposite wall,
scored in the lintel of my door,
but it keeps bleeding though
into the world we share.
Mornings when I wake,
curled in my web,
I hear it come
with a rush of resin
out of the trauma
of its lopping-off.
Obstinate bud,
sticky with life,
mad for the rain again,
it racks itself with shoots
that crackle overhead,
dividing as they grow.
Let be! Let be!
I shake my wings
and fly into its boughs.
The poem stands out for me in part because my dad had a year-long battle with a similar knothole. As a child it was at my eye level and I was fascinating by its will to live a decade at least after it died.
The surrealness of the poem strikes flight as “emotionally real”. It unfolds as if in real time and we can see the mental image crackle open.
The world we share as being on one side of the paint is a striking idea. Curled in my web is lovely for its simplicity. He doesn’t go on to explain it all out for the reader but trusts they have some intelligence which is lovely and rare.
The Chameleon Couch: Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2011). This was a poet I discovered thru the Tree reading series when Carol featured a tribute to him a few weeks ago. His language is musical and pressing. He has a tiresome amount of poems othering females as untouchable muses. He doesn’t break form the way Acorn does to speak real or bring reach speech towards poetry which is a pity. It can be a long song and dance sometimes to force poems to be poetry at a loss of direct communication. But when he writes a tribute to his guitar I sense I could know what a guitar means to a guitarist, even being the philistine towards music that I am.
p38 has what I assume is about the WWII Nazi emptying of Jagiellonian University. Here’s the first half of the poem:
Memory of the Murdered Professors at th Jagiellonian
after Hasior
They fired a bullet into the head
of each question, trying to kill Kant’s
unending argument with Hegel.
They burned laws, moral codes,
& the Golden Mean. Anyone
serving tea & cookies to Death,
looking or acting as if he knew love,
stood before the firing squad.
All questions had to go. Pronoun
or noun. If it crawled on busted kneecaps,
whimpering & begging for mercy,
it was still half a question.
Unfortunately it’s a topic that is timely.
Women Romantic Poets: 1785-1832 An Anthology edited by Jennifer Breen (Everyman Library, 1992) p. 81-83, Anna Barbauld, 1797, from the point of view of a girl cared for my her grandmother:
Saints have been calm while stretched upon the rack,
And Montezuma smiled on burning coals;
But never did a housewife notable
Greet with a smile a rainy washing day. […]
All hand employed to wash, to rinse, to wring,
Or fold, and stach, and clap, and iron, and plait.
Then I would set me down, and ponder much
Why washings were; sometimes through hollow hole
Of pipe, amusement we blew, and sent aloft
The floating bubbles; little dreaming then
To see, Montgolfier, thy silken ball
Ride buoyant through the clouds, so near approach
The sports of children and the toils of men.
Earth, air, and sky, and ocean hath its bubbles,
And verse is one of them – this most of all.
The Mood Embosser by Louis Cabri (Coach House, 2001). He is continually breaking against his sense and meaning, pivoting around more than a water bug. The overall thrust is to play in language although that does not prevent him from dabbling in meaning/judgement of what poetry is for/corrupted for. A sort of call to arms
p. 19 (poem is 11 pages long so I’ll excerpt)
Poetry’s Law of Diminishing Utility.
Reversed, next
meter reading.
Petro-Canada Poet Laureates of the Peter
Gzowski Invitational Golf Tournament.
‘What a responsible person to write about.’
Their turmoil, our terms,
Our ‘their’, their ow.
Symetry that knowledge brings
them theme.
To a balloon, laden with knowledge
one head at a time. (‘Sharks for Beginners‘)
Knowledge contained in
tiny bubble darts over hairline, eyes
a mythical concept, confused,
fixed on glory.
What do we miss when we try to nab that good line, good poem, good story angle? What do we miss when we try to avoid any story, conclusion, leading rhetoric? What sub-texts slip in anyway?
Haiku Mind: 108 Poems to Cultivate Awareness & Open Your Heart by Patricia Donegan (Shambhala, 2008)
Frogpond, Vol 35:2
Regarding Renewal by Cameron Anstee (above/ground, 2012)
Sex First & Then a Sandwich by Amanda Earl (above/ground, 2012)
Excerpts from Impossible Books: The Crawdad Cantos by Stephen Brockwell (above/ground, 2012)
flicker by Mariyln Irwin (above/ground, 2012)
Tilt: Poems by E. Blagrave (Cormorant Books, 2012)
Architectural Variations by Carol A Stephen (Quillfyre Publishing, 2012)
Untitled (for Billy Mavreas) by derek beaulieu (Puddles of Sky Press, 2012)