Christopher Bakken Poems

...me likey. http://www.mississippireview.com/2005/Vol11No4-Oct05/1104-100105-bakken.html

First Objects

… unstoried, artless, unenhanced.

The moment we set off on the ocean,
steering pine boxes with nothing but faith,
we became ideas, the bas-relief
of an army the gods set in motion,
hardened with an integument of gold.
Dandelion, limestone, free enterprise.
A hurricane of glass beads and horseflies.
Things we believed at the dreadful thresholds
of canyons. All too grand. Steeple, chimney,
tower, sky: erections proved our destiny
to contract the size of the hemisphere.
We might have stayed put, but couldn’t bear
the sense that we were rising, calm as geese
caught between the sights of a shotgun.


Eclogue (4)

You managed to swell the conversation, plying
me with grog and a platter of blue-throated mushrooms.
Then I was awakened by the call of Silenus,
his frantic dirge from Thrace refracted through the leaves
of a pistachio tree—each branch smoldered
while we stared, then blossomed into a swarm of eyes.

I was awakened again, but didn’t hear you
wish you lived far enough from the world, wish some
hermit wisdom epigrammed the pages of your book.
But you won’t write an anchorite’s healing Bible;
your dreams spring from our common trenches of ash
and graveyards greener than green has a right to be.

I was awakened again, but didn’t hear you
since all I heard fell open like a broken gate:
I was dumbfounded by the hammering
clatter our lambs made when they plummeted to earth
--no one else could bear to see the semaphoric
epic they bleated out in their dying.

I was awakened once more when the sky’s atlas
scrawled its noise on the basin of my skull and five
armies marched between us, fighting over seeds
we spit. Three distinct excuses made them shell
the empty goat-pens, but I didn’t learn them.
Their pyres singe the edges of our poetry.

Outside everywhere, we see as far as vultures,
what history can’t, invent an anthem to survive.
Since there’s nothing beyond the rise, past the verge
of our vineyard, we invite nothing in, fix it
with our cairns, with our tangled wire and fence posts,
and allow ourselves the luxury of that lie.


Eclogue (5)

Now the season comes when the birds fall,
their migrations bewildered by missiles.
They litter our lawns without saying a word.

Thus every feverish apathetic
earns cash to buy his suburban beer:
we all must keep the country clean. So much

that is common has become uncommon.
Our pastures are supernaturally
green. The dirt itself is dying of health,

pleasing only the Emperor’s right eye.
From where we sit, our view is all volcano,
spurting with impossible crudeness.

The sacred bees, tired of mining essence
from thyme, swarm the public statuary
to vibrate the marble groin of Caesar.

Once, the cattle stopped chewing when we sang;
insightful goats wobbled from the mountain,
spurred by Pan and the promise of acorns.

Now that nature mocks us, we say farewell
to the oracles and caryatids
in favor of an awkward, backward bliss,

clip the hedge between dissent and despair,
no more unruly than a clutch of lambs,
yet company, somehow, to the vulgar.

Our distress is merely metaphysical,
we often wish, an inconvenience
we constitute, in spite of ourselves,

by continuing stubbornly to live.
So we pound out, with little sticks and stones,
the lewdest music: singing with our mouths shut.


Bakken's not afraid to veer about, or to cram a bunch of unexpected nouns together (see: dandelion, limestone, free enterprise; A hurricane of glass beads and horseflies). I mean, really-- "hammering/clatter our lambs made."

Enjoy!

Dana Goodyear

A couple Dana Goodyear poems:
http://www.poems.com/twop2goo.htm

Oasis

We found (like the deserting) spacious calm,
drank a pair of Arnold Palmers underneath a palm.
Went for massage and mud, lacquer, love,
overheated minerals, a stimulating rub.
Then — as if it could be used, as if for art —
I placed a grain of doubt in your open-pored heart,
and watched what had been small dilate
and everything else evaporate.


Day and Age

Skimming by,
the milky spill of my old eye,
the mute white cat
now skirts me at the store.
Retarded and alert.

What good are instincts anymore?
Who does the math
for lengths of desperation
and how far to the door?

A woman, pregnant
like a red wool bud,
is circling the rink.
Catastrophe, I think.

...Ya, it reads like light verse, but it's fun! She doesn't contort her syntax or make anything overly complicated. This is supposed to be precise, light, and fun to read. If you're gonna play with rhyme sans meter, might as well go for broke. Note that she keeps it small and image-based, though--this isn't an abstraction fest. "red wool bud"; "milky spill"; "mud, lacquer, love"--there is precise joy to be found here.

~Dani

An Ezine

...worth looking at:

http://www.southernhum.com/ I turned it up because I was enjoying the work of Cherryl Floyd-Miller in the November issue of POETRY. It's a good issue--I recommend picking it up! http://www.poetrymagazine.org/ They actual give half-price subscriptions to students. If the selections stay in the current vein, I'll buy in again.

Happy reading!

Dani

Elizabeth Bishop

I was cajoled into attending the latest Cameron Diaz vehicle, "In Her Shoes," and was pleasantly surprised when the plot arc veered into poetry. So, an oldie but goodie, featured in the film:

One Art~Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

...this poem is a joy to read aloud. Read it, and read it again. The repeated sounds and words aid this. It's probably a villanelle; here's a link to clarify: (http://www.uni.edu/~gotera/CraftOfPoetry/villanelle.html). Your assignment: Play with repetition. Make it bold, make it clear, make it obvious. Shake from your brain the essay-based "never use the same word twice" lecture that leads us to abuse thesauri. (Though I do adore thesaurus.com--I'm guilty as the next.)

Two more poets

Charles O. Hartman:

Honeydew

As the poem paces down Main Street
on its way to the sparkling harbor
it knows to notice tints on the pigeons' backs
but "tends to forget" the man heaped on the stoop.
The better the poem knows its business
the smaller its business needs to be.
Its shoes are tied, its jacket buttoned up;
its pockets are sewn shut. The man wonders
if the poem has any money, but the poem
has no money, is proud of not having any money,
of having only the sun to make gold of the sidewalk
and glamour the water in the harbor awaiting it.
A hole the size let's say of a honeydew
passes completely through its chest.


Parent's Pantoum~Carolyn Kizer

for Maxine Kumin

Where did these enormous children come from,
More ladylike than we have ever been?
Some of ours look older than we feel.
How did they appear in their long dresses

More ladylike than we have ever been?
But they moan about their aging more than we do,
In their fragile heels and long black dresses.
They say they admire our youthful spontaneity.

They moan about their aging more than we do,
A somber group--why don't they brighten up?
Though they say they admire our youthful spontaneity
The beg us to be dignified like them

As they ignore our pleas to brighten up.
Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention
Then we won't try to be dignified like them
Nor they to be so gently patronizing.

Someday perhaps we'll capture their attention.
Don't they know that we're supposed to be the stars?
Instead they are so gently patronizing.
It makes us feel like children--second-childish?

Perhaps we're too accustomed to be stars.
The famous flowers glowing in the garden,
So now we pout like children. Second-childish?
Quaint fragments of forgotten history?

Our daughters stroll together in the garden,
Chatting of news we've chosen to ignore,
Pausing to toss us morsels of their history,
Not questions to which only we know answers.

Eyes closed to news we've chosen to ignore,
We'd rather excavate old memories,
Disdaining age, ignoring pain, avoiding mirrors.
Why do they never listen to our stories?

Because they hate to excavate old memories
They don't believe our stories have an end.
They don't ask questions because they dread the answers.
They don't see that we've become their mirrors,

We offspring of our enormous children.


I'm not normally a fan of questions within poetry--too ponderous, or too nudge-nudge, or too shruggy--but Kizer does a fine job here (though some are better than others--"why don't they brighten up," or "don't they know we're supposed to be the stars" are both effective, IMO). Both are a bit imploring, and the question mark adds to this feel.

Hartman does here what I've seen done well in a few instances--taking the "idea" of a poem, and walking it about somewhere unexpected. The idea of poetry living and interacting is one I reckon I will not tire of, even if said 'poem' is up to no good.

Your assignment: Take a poem somewhere, as Hartman does. Think boldly--try putting the poem in truly improbable places, and see what that spawns. And maybe stick a question in there--while I may shrink at a question mark, this does not mean it is not a useful tool that cannot be employed to great effect in a poem.

Dani

More Poetry Shoppin'

I've become increasingly pleased with the gems I've turned up in Seattle's used bookstores--I was in Magus Books just off the Ave last night, and I plucked two more unknowns (to me) from a rather large poetry section. Most books run around $6, so it is quite reasonable to pick up a few.

Here's a selection from Michael Earl Craig (http://www.jubilat.org/n9/craig.html):


IN THE JANUARIED MOUNTAINS

My little horse must think it queer.
But who cares what he thinks?
Listening to an animal might get me killed
look what happened to Walter.

And so I go on.
Not just with life in general
but with this particular day.
And I allow things to happen,
like the snow to come down,
like Tom Waits' Alice to create
a tiny stainless drain somewhere
in my core this morning.

And I dig out and put on
a very old pair of tennis shorts
that look like a dinner napkin.

And I step out into the yard
and kneel, and pet the studded radial,
like running a hand across an open field
of steel babies' teeth.

And I think about flogging him.
The horse!
I think about going back out there to find him.
And I think about Klaus Kinski.
What would Klaus Kinski do? I think
about how in theory the hammer
is never to hit the anvil.
I think about how a butterfly, if
permitted, will crawl neurotically
all over a soldier's face for half an hour.

The snow sifts down like so many blankets.
As I move out across the pasture
I think about this . . . and Kinski. And anvils.

I can't say I'm surprised to find
my little horse breathing a dent for himself
in the snow. Nor that the dent looks strangely
like a baby Jesus. A baby Jesus on his back,
sinking into the snow.


...I rather love the title--"Januaried." I like messing about with super familiar words in this way.

Here's a Robert Gluck:

Torch Song for
Bright-in-Fame Luck to Read

If mountains should
speak my language,
stars crumble, fall
and feel me this radiant

decay. Short Tight Tiny Skirt,
my name is eternity;
Mr. Motive, Miss Locket,
Mr. Jacket.

Say you want me,
strangers in many ways.
From fetus to antithesis
name me in the dark.


...so, again, my ability to pluck curious and unusual work from piles and piles of it was tested. I enjoy the process--I tell myself that I'm looking for work that immediately strikes a new chord for me--that seems unfamiliar straight away. It's getting harder and harder to turn up work that hits my retina this way, but I'm still managing.

Here's one link that popped up when searching for Gluck--it's got some Dodie Bellamy on it, who is an author who will be reading on the UW-Bothell campus this quarter.

http://www.cultureport.com/newhp/lingo/lingo6.html

...your assignment: Read loads and loads of poetry. Read for Beauty over content, at least at first--allow the first impression of the poems & language to wash over you. Building up a poetry "base" will help you explore unusual avenues in your own writing.

Dani

Starting Points

Being in my current poetry class has reminded me how heated conversations around poetry can get. I imagine it's a good thing--poetry isn't all puppies and kittens, and we shouldn't spend all our time cooing away at each other with sweet nothings. Poetry often has tension, wit, anger--there's no point in shutting off the conversation in the name of niceness, or even *heh* civility (although dialogue is preferable to out-and-out shouting matches, I reckon). If you're new to the blog, I recommend reading through the archives--there's some good assignments in there, and a number of poems worth reading.

Something I've seen time and again are poems that cloverleaf off of a quote or found statement or phrase. This can be a good exercise as well, if you have something in mind, or if you have friends who would be willing to send you a curious sentence or two. It can be especially surprising to give yourself something really out of context, like lines from a recipe, something from a crazy advertisement, or bizarre newspaper headlines--these sort of triggers are more likely to dredge up something surprising from the back of your mind.

Take, for example, this Brad Leithauser poem:

After the Detonation of the Moon

"Hate Winter? Here's a Scientist's Answer: Blow Up the Moon." (WSJ Headline)

We *were* overwhelmed, just as they'd intended:
for wasn't this the greatest show of clout
the world had ever seen, and all without
loss of a single life--an exploit splendid
no less for its humanity than for
its sweeping expertise? And they were right
that life would go on as it had. The night
was still the night. The stars blazed all the more
in a cleared sky.
.........................These days we seldom fall
for that trick of the eye by which some tall
mist-softened clocktower or fogged street lamp will
recall a changing face, and something tidal
heave in the chest, then ebb, leaving us all
to wonder when if ever this sea too might still.

(I added the periods to get the formatting right).


...the rhyme doesn't become as apparent until the latter stanza; his meter is an irregular iambic, (you can hear it in these lines: for WASn't THIS the GREATest SHOW of CLOUT/the WORLD had EVer SEEN, and ALL withOUT/ & /these DAYS we SELdom FALL/--it helps to find meter by *really* exaggerating the stress when you read aloud).

so--find yourself a funny/sad/surprising line or two from somewhere unexpected, and allow a poem to evolve from it. Don't worry about editing right away--allow your brain to riff off of the idea, and cull later on, when the strongest idea emerges clearly from the bunch.

Best,

Dani