morning lawn
soil boils these up,
sprung from and to life
the larvae of June bugs
are what the scolded dog
dug for with her head-tossed
glee, snapping more air
than bodies. no necks
to break with a shake.
they are not of this world yet,
lit to be moons for earthworms
what of this sun and motion?
no earth to press back?
lardy white snacks,
feather-stem legs curled in
these globs of shed dirt
these brown-headed grubs
call skunks as if they’re
scented as if in heat.
the skunks come and
uncover lunches.
the rooting and rutting
season has begun.
*
Check out all the responses to the OSI prompt of cognizance
And unrelatedly, an article about me in The Globe and Mail, In Other Words column

What you don’t say has a power.
What you can’t talk about, but do gives self and writing a power. Perhaps in part because of how it sounds secret or respectful even if it trounces because there’s still a pulled punch and compelling small-motioned animation, an attention to detail, an infusing of a mood from sidelighting more than heavily made-up theatrical faces and harsh spotlights.
In a way the most oppressed culture could make the most intense poems, by that psychological bottleneck of what can’t be expressed reaching the point where what they can’t say is less important than what they must.
Substitute personal scale of isolation, self-imposed taboos and you can replicate systemic suppression, the condition of just the right level of threat so that one only feels safe to speak slant, stylistically to the page or in correspondence that could possibly be intercepted but probably won’t be.
This harnessed tongue creates a stop gap, but for all the bind and stress of fear of repercussion, the lag before saying anyway in poetry also allows time for things to sink deeper, be ruminated longer, understood more, and grow in significance.
It is up to the person whether the weight becomes onerous or an opening. Any experience may come to have the symbolic applied. A click-shut last line in one of Ronna Bloom’s Permisso spoke to this presumed state by calling out the particular as not to be read symbolically. Poet’s first language is the double-entendre. The “marked state” is the single level of reading.
Sina Queryas mentioned in her panel of how being immersed in the U.S. culture of not allowing to question the prevailing American narrative of 9/11 or the supremacy of the automobile created an environment to press against that was formative in making her Expressways.
Poems are people we make to talk to about what we don’t get the leeway to do with those we already know, or to dialogue more intelligently than we manage in person in the demands of real-time quick jump rope (ha! typed rump joke first).
Anyhew, poems are about things to say. Even if that saying is done by spacial arrangement of shapes, about symmetry, about not permitting symmetry, about the act of refusing to make a particular version of sense or doing a particular version of sense better. It is talking to oneself and letting someone listen in on what we need ourselves to hear. Bonus cream if people show that people remember something comparable, or were in the act of nearly realizing the same thing. A Cento is a way of cobbling a dialogue out of real time and acknowledging the word-stones.
In Donna Kane‘s field with the fort took me to my field with the fort. The speed trap poem from 4 years ago, the sense of space of camping from 3 years ago. Anyway, her poem,

Dragonfly
Whatever possessed up to stop
mating on the fly, conjuring wind
with our minds, propelling our bodies
across the lake past
sail boats going no where. Remember
how determined we were to make love
in a moving vehicle? You drove.
I blocked your view. We nearly hit the ditch
in our sincerity to get it right. Call it
an evolutionary throw-back, a too-literal
interpretation or just a need
to say the earth moved, but in every corner
we didn’t cut, dragonflies
lifted from the reeds, their primeval wings
shuffling together like a desk of cards.

p. 42 of Erratic (Hagios 08)
Such a keening yearning. Love the line ending on Call it and it adding a layer. Love the line break at lake past and the bang on humour in We nearly hit the ditch/in our sincerity to get it right. Looping back from the end of line to the top, what compelled us to stop thinking we were dragonflies. Such wist. It makes one feel old and young simultaneously.
I wrote this one on the same subject as Kane. It’s from 4 years ago. All I remembered of it was the first stanza. Which is just as well. Now I’d change it to cut all but the first stanza and cut some of that too. Pah, it’ll take the full of 2 decades to get it started, like anything.

Marcus McCann nominated for the Gerald Lampert Award for his book Soft Where. Here’s part of a poem from p. 30 called Fake Spring

The mud-sucked foot, a popped cork,
the hill we slicked, build a stick fence on —
sweet spot, spit abnegated, againable,
socks of mound flour, 200 lbs,
a ton, wet a mole’s nose. Stop.
Thaw. What we thought reprieve
looked like: vacation, night walking
its dog. Or sleep-disrupted,
drains plugged, waterlogged, how
we crept up the stairs — groping,
groggy at the slimmest slice of
sweet spot, spit abnegated, againable,

Some lovely oblique and direct tumble of words at play in here:

It’s got some wonderful rhythms, speaking of which in other reading…

“the rhythm and music of a poem reawaken sedentary readers to the half-forgotten metres of their own pulses, while certain lines of poetry elicit a primitive, physical response – cause shivering, tears, cause hairs to hackle on the forearm. Re-embody us. Reconnect us to real life.” ~ Steven Heighton, p. 59 The Admen Move on Lhasa: Writing and Culture in a Virtual World [via Heather]

I am thinking that instead of doing a new poem a day for NaPoWriMo that I’ll refuel. I’m about tapped for drafts. Time to let wellsprings refill the aquifer. I’ll set aside time each day to reflect with no intention towards poem, only the observation itself. Or look on a poem and share what I liked, like I did yesterday.
Meanwhile the AngelHouse Press site has launched its annual edition of National Poetry Month. The 2010 goes live today. The first poet up is Marton Koppany. (Psst, watch for mine on April 3rd.)

Versed by Rae Armantrout (What a striking percentage of inflections codified in italics and quotation marks thru the text’s short lines yet it all works together.) Excerpt from p. 109, Still

Once we believed the bees,
moving as attention does
settling and lifting
from blue identicals.
were the picture
of eternity.

Is a pretty ahhh with a hook to the half-hooked expectations. But a bit of p. 6,

Let’s see
your itty-
bitten specificity
fetish,
your mom’s phantasmic
what’s-it
held conspicuously
under threat.
Day hoists its mesh
of near
approximations,
(its bright
skein of pores.)
Eyes fetch thrown
shadows

What a fun play with language, this dexterity reminding me to visit Adeena Karasick again.
Each word to word and punctuation isn’t predictible, yet is right. Love how internally she has periods for end of sentence and at ends of numbered poem sections and yet end of poems don’t have a period. The page ending is signal enough.
And to end the sample with Address of page 7. A shy whispered sort of tone following on the heels of the lingustic romp above with a straight-up truth, the pangs implicit.

The way my interest
in their imaginary
kiss
is secretly addressed
to you.

I can happily read and reread.
The Book of the City of the Ladies by Christine de Pizan (1405)
Section I:20.1 Here She Speaks of Zenobia, Queen of the Palmyrenes

This lady did not consider it a hardship to to sleep in the woods, on the hard ground in cold an in heat, for she feared nothing, nor did she mind travelling through forest passes, climbing mountains, going down into villages as she pursued the various beasts […] So wisely did this lady govern that she was honored by princes, obeyed and loved by her people, and feared and respected by her knights. When she rode out in arms, which happened frequently,…

Somehow I feel like this book should have been made mention of. 6 English courses and 7 history courses from high school and university and half the population eerily absent. Ah well, self-learning is for the building on the rest.
Judge Sewall’s Apology: The Salem Witch Trials and the Forming of an American Conscience, p. 100 and 125

Proctor reversed the equation between the accusers and the accused, transferring evil possession to the afflicted — naturally enough, since his own wife was going to be in the dock. If you were convinced that an accused person was innocent, then, of course, the accusers themselves looked demonic.
[…]witchcraft testimony pointed in two directions: outward toward the farming landscape and the wilderness beyond, inwards to the depths of the individual soul. Often the lattwe course would be triggered by an argument […] a family is struck by a mysterious misfortune that causes real fear and suffering, so they track back for a possible explanation.

Although the theory of mass hysteria from a mould causing trippiness from the grainery is intriguing, the community failing as individuals to call a spade and cowarding out less they get implicated too seems more in keeping with probability. A whole community polarized or else standing well back as the scene gets more complex.