Steve Mueske

I dunno how to say his last name.

http://www.newhampshirereview.com/mueske.htm

one of these is up for a Pushcart. This guy's got some poet's joy goin' on:
(you should visit the site--there's a recording of him reading, and the italics are still in there. I always lose the formatting.)

The Shrike in the Garden of Machinery

i.)

A lesser god in the kingdom of thorns,
I carried Eve out of storage
one sleepless night, plucked her eyes
from their velvet case, oiled her rusty joints.
By lamplight, I planned to remake her
from memory, a goddess before good and evil,
the original Conversation. All that.

I blew the dust from her hair,
set the torsion of her fingers,
wound the key in her back. Why?
To watch her mouth bloom. So I could,
as a drunken bee, buzz at her lips.
I wanted her to speak to me, undress
with conviction. But she was dead. Folded
into the book of days like a flier for happiness.

ii.)

Isn’t this the way of things? Clematis flowers
sprouting and rotting on the same angry vine. The one thing
you can’t have centered in your mind, a splinter.

The clot of traffic, those in the city drowning
on sidewalks. The improvisation of ventricles,
dilated pupils. Hours dreaming the perfect Thing.

Portrait of man leaning toward window.
Man waiting for bus. Man wedged in slices of bread.
A refrain: one day the next day the day before …

It won’t be long before the hatchling pecks
through the skin of that building, and that, emerging
wet and weak-necked, sport for a new breed of man.

And still there is the hunt for the Fruit.
The blood of erasure. The Serpent’s belly rasping
on steamy roadside grates. Do you know, yet,

the price of knowledge? There in the center of it all,
the spike, the compass lined with bodies.

iii.)

Listen. There are three ways to speak.
One involves hiding in the weeds, covered

with stories. Though you may be tempted to,
don’t call me Adam. I’ve never been here before.

I come out of the redness of earth.
My eyes are on fire.

The solid weight of the Pomegranate is a real thing.
Everything else is a mnemonic for desire.


Award for best title ever:

Song 119 From the Ultimate Fake Book

Here we are, little pint of cider,
half drunk with invention, singing
an improvisation in G
to the snakes in the trees,
the hissing beetles
battling in smoky shade. O
little flower of necrosis, see!
I am naked, adrift
in this wilderness
on a loosely-lashed raft.
Below me, the river stirs
with many-toothed fish,
the small gray kind,
who are underpaid and hold grudges,
schooled in the wily arts
of insurrection.
Above me, the deft birds,
with their blurry punctuation,
their daft and noisy counterpoint:
Look at me! Look at me!
And I am looking, O
coda of the green mind, O unformed
thought, for a polysyllabic word
meaning threnody, rhapsody,
the throat filling
with the unspeakable
and then letting it go.

Theodore Roethke

...post-veggie-Turkey Day, we were watching the Roethke KCTS special for a bit:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/artsentertainment/2002642814_roethke24.html

another handy link: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/roethke/roethke.htm

http://gawow.com/roethke/

..I rather like the UW annual Roethke readings--no, not just because there's free wine & loads of poets milling about

Here's a few poems:

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 Far Field
I
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

II
At the field's end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, --
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole's elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, --
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, --
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

-- Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I'll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.


III
The river turns on itself,
The tree retreats into its own shadow.
I feel a weightless change, a moving forward
As of water quickening before a narrowing channel
When banks converge, and the wide river whitens;
Or when two rivers combine, the blue glacial torrent
And the yellowish-green from the mountainy upland, --
At first a swift rippling between rocks,
Then a long running over flat stones
Before descending to the alluvial plane,
To the clay banks, and the wild grapes hanging from the elmtrees.
The slightly trembling water
Dropping a fine yellow silt where the sun stays;
And the crabs bask near the edge,
The weedy edge, alive with small snakes and bloodsuckers, --
I have come to a still, but not a deep center,
A point outside the glittering current;
My eyes stare at the bottom of a river,
At the irregular stones, iridescent sandgrains,
My mind moves in more than one place,
In a country half-land, half-water.

I am renewed by death, thought of my death,
The dry scent of a dying garden in September,
The wind fanning the ash of a low fire.
What I love is near at hand,
Always, in earth and air.

IV
The lost self changes,
Turning toward the sea,
A sea-shape turning around, --
An old man with his feet before the fire,
In robes of green, in garments of adieu.
A man faced with his own immensity
Wakes all the waves, all their loose wandering fire.
The murmur of the absolute, the why
Of being born falls on his naked ears.
His spirit moves like monumental wind
That gentles on a sunny blue plateau.
He is the end of things, the final man.

All finite things reveal infinitude:
The mountain with its singular bright shade
Like the blue shine on freshly frozen snow,
The after-light upon ice-burdened pines;
Odor of basswood on a mountain-slope,
A scent beloved of bees;
Silence of water above a sunken tree :
The pure serene of memory in one man, --
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.

Jay Thomas

Another shout-out to the U San Francisco Poetry MFA program:
http://www.mipoesias.com/2006/thomas.html

A Few Coins

Blue ones
under brown.

Not eyes but houses.

Almost evening. Paper sheets
that scurry from the shadows.

Advertisements, bodies
lit from within. Spotlights
on hand-printed walls.

Rain soaks through.
Separates ink

from glass. Yanked wires
dangle. Our tiny legs

one hundred feet
above the snow.
_____

Celine Half Hugs, Half Knocks Him Down

Got his smile washed
in the glare of the propositions.

Some diligent mutt. God-of-the-hay?
Must’ve been a different year,

bus wire threaded through the alley’s
narrow passage, paint

strings looped to Tennessee.
She stands his picture still.

“Champagne for representation
and a dip in the Chesapeake!

Hats off to the moon who makes
the nectarines grow!” As if all those trees

were graves. As if she could deny
the low sad panoply

of logical form or the iron
tension between his bones.

He blows the sidewalk,
gaze down.

Aaron Shurin

Again, I've plucked something from Silliman's blog--but, there are more linkages this time: Shurin has read at the local Subtext readings, and also teaches in the San Fran U MFA, which Dr Heuving likes to laud. Turning up his work online was a bit tricky, but I found some:

http://www.epoetry.org/issues/spring01/text/poems/aas1.html#xiii

Three poems from Involuntary Lyrics

XIII.

Jeffrey pines at Lassen leak vanilla sap in sunlight, bear-
clawed trunks scary about any possible bend in road we're
hiking; fallen Douglas fir dissolve as reddened sawdust in situ, literal shadows of decay.
Alice the fucking ground here is live
fumarole and boiling pot, what's to uphold
our giddy bodies, oh, the boiling ground will do. You prepare
the fire I'll enact the food. Day
is over there valley's end behind hill, no mountain, we climbed; has no more to give
before we roll into the tent. Hmm, that was one, two, five months ago. Too cold
now for tenting. Simple statements lie, but lease
this partially, later we'll chase down perplexity: I know
if there were
further red maple swamp or city grid or winter dune indigo or cowpie pasture facing we'd go so
fluently, improvise our foolish walkalong songs with such fraternal ease…

XLVI.

music lies
inside a war
on words impaneled
with oak notes in sight
of codes gaps fooled heart
overdrunk at the bar
with intention determined
to (be) right
any part
of that lie
swings groove-part
you metonymy eyes
take over for loaded mr. heart
no incoming beam deny

LV.

waking up gastric into memory
of who I betrayed lying monuments
to — what? — enmity
against — what? self? father? — why dream now not really dream but rhyme
psychic disposition to unfocused other room
peopled spewing contents
of — what? — locked in brain posterity
replay diminishes time
mobius mirror doom
same view over same view overturn
not "mine" but structures of interplay arise
doubled self as other or other as self such masonry
behind eyes
looking at — what?— make eyes burn

...and here's a link to his MFA's ezine:

http://www.swback.com/

this work is super out there. I'm going to have to read these a few times.

~Dani

Political Poetry

Googling political poetry turns up quite a few blogs & E-zines. My current poetry course inspired this particular Google, as we're reading the Beats right now (which I'm not overly enjoying, as I find them verbose, sloppy & self-involved, but the history is interesting & their impact is undeniable), and all of this is reminding me that occasionally poetry rises to prominence because of politics--because someone writes such an artful polemic or poetic call-to-arms, we all tune in. I'm not sure that the Poets Against the War project (or whatever that thing is) accomplished what they set out to do, but I am fairly confident that current affairs are ripe for the poetic picking.

Par example, Willie Perdomo:
(http://poetry.about.com/library/weekly/aa052301a.htm)
(http://www.nortonpoets.com/perdomow.htm)
(http://www.artistsnetwork.org/eventsIcore/perdomo.html)

“Crazy Bunch Barbecue”
Jefferson Park, Summer 1999

This is definitely
for the brothers
who ain't here
who woulda said
I had to write a poem
about this get together
like a list of names
on a memorial
to celebrate
our own old-timers day
for those of us
who age in hood years
where one night
can equal the rest of your life
and surviving the trade off
was worth writing on the wall
and telling the world
that we were here forever

The day started with snaps
on good-livin' pot bellies
receding hair lines
and new roles as Mr. Moms
Jerry had the best joke of the day
when he said that my family was so poor
that on Thanksgiving
they had to buy turkey-flavored Now & Laters
the laughter needed no help
when we exposed the stretch marks
of our growing pains

Phil had barbecue on the grill
He slapped my hand when
I tried to brush extra sauce
on a leg
“Yo, go find something to do
write a poem
write something
do something
I got this
I'm the chef
You the poet
Talk about how you glad to be here
do something
look at that little boy
on the baseball diamond
running circles around second base
today is his birthday
look at him
beat the wind
with his balloon.”

It used to take a few drinks before
we could cry and say I love you
we have always known how to curse
and bless the dead
but now we know how to talk in silence
as we walk into the sun
like the little boy's sneakers
we disappear in a cloud of dirt
and we go home
grown up
and full

This is definitely
for the brothers
who ain't here
who woulda said
I had to write a poem
about this get together
like a list of names
on a memorial
to celebrate
our own old-timers day
for those of us
who age in hood years
where one night
can equal the rest of your life
and surviving the trade off
was worth writing on the wall
and telling the world
that we were here forever

It's sort of like Harryette Mullen mated with Kerouac circa On The Road. Or something. The capture of time/place is undeniable here, and the vernacular is startling for those more frequently buttered up with the 'more proper' side o' things. It still reads as more slam-like than normal 'page poetry,' but is closer to Patricia Smith in its ability to straddle that particularly finicky line.

Dani

Slope

...I'm always pleased when I turn up a nice new online journal:
http://www.slope.org/21%20poetry%20bolster.html

Stephanie Bolster poems:

Ubiquitous in this domain

The pygmy hippo comes with lettuce.
Polar bear with a red ball, everything
with pigeons. The smaller, indoor animal

draws back as though admitting you
to a parlour, walls painted into the distance
of where it might have lived.

Africa’s the height of popularity,
strollers dripping ice cream and mustard.

In Paris, Chicago, Barcelona, the paddock
for giraffes is just like this. There are things
of which it can be said that no such things exist.*

*Alexius Meinong


Peacock

The world in a tail, that’s what
we came for. The swirl of oil spilled in a lot
one June night outside the cinema.
Just past sunset, what the day was
flashes up, purpled with what
some wince at as regret.
The call erodes the throat
of the listener. What lack! The tail unfolds
its devastation: many eyes emblazoned
turquoise, emerald, witness
our disregard for each thing other
than their beauty. Our eyes dilate
to the backs of mirrors.



Changing Room

The same grated drain.
Where girls don’t look away
and let their mouths drop to gapes
or laughs, a curtain hangs its plastic strips
for the visitor to part. The animal is washed.
Instead of lockers for the towels
the mothers folded, a trough.
The door with its bolt. A daily bar of light
across the back’s shellac.
To refresh, a whiff of bleach.
Girls wait for their mothers, wrung suits
damp in their bags, still in the room
in which their mothers still live.


Jardin des Plantes, Winter

Where in the garden
is the garden? Rain

pools in the gravel
paths. Sculptures

of the eminent,
teary with mildew.

No one here.
This is the heart

of old Paris. Once
the outskirts. A labyrinth

and a vertical installation
through which sand does not

move. In spring, a carousel
of poppies will ruin it with joy.


...such good nouns here. Always show your nouns some love. Seriously--take a compelling poem or two & underline all of the nouns (the same could be done with verbs.) 999/1000 times, the nouns will be surprising & compelling. Work your vocab--take a word or two you're not comfortable with, and make yourself comfortable with it. Wedge yourself firmly into the new.

Dani

Exquisite Corpse

This site is really worth a gander:
http://www.corpse.org/index.html

related--this site is great: http://www.exquisitecorpse.com/definition.html

and this one:
http://members.tripod.com/raeven/excorp.html



...get some friends, or even strangers, and write a poem! The nouveau coterie.

~Dani

Purity of Voice

One of poets' favorite things to argue about, I've found, is the idea of 'voice'--what is it? Does it exist? Is it important? And one of the permutations this argument often takes is the path 'o purity--this is often the argument put forward when someone does not want to revise their work, or take offered advice, as it might somehow affect the "purity" of the original thought, original voice in the poem.

I'm going to try and build an argument here: This idea of voice *is* important. BUT--this voice is cultivated over weeks, years, decades--it incorporates what one has read, what one emulates, specifically and accidentally, and often includes a healthy dose of "inner voice"--how you "think" comes out in what you write. I would argue that the 'voice' of a person is constantly evolving, and thus should be amenable to change, if one is being honest with themselves. The idea of 'purity,' to me, contradicts the notion of change--it indicates a poet feels good about where they are, for whatever misguided reason (because I tend to think poets should always be seeking out the 'new,' and not be settled on their laurels doing the same damn thing ad infinitum--what's the point of being in a medium such as poetry if you're just going to repeat yourself?).

...whatever filters we have can cause us to say things in a vernacular particular to our own experience, but the idea of 'preserving' that voice seems just odd--I think it would be fairly difficult to 'remove' voice from poetry, unless someone were methodically adding the words/ideas of another person verbatim. 'Voice' is in there and will stay in there, with revision or without, in other words. What runs through our own heads in a good faith way can become our own--this is why some poems seem like a great twist on an old idea, when other poems seem like poor parodies. So, in sum, I'd argue it's not about 'purity of voice'--it's about honest self-reflection, and the ability to assimilate what is needed, and discard what is not. Trying to pretend we're poet tabula rasas, impervious to outside influence (& believing that is a *good* thing) seems laughable. You have to read to see what is out there already, and to see what it is that flips your switches. Writing blindly, with no greater context, 999/1000 times leads to horrific poetry--pure voice or no.

But, don't mimic--evaluate, assess, assimilate. Reading loads & loads of poetry will help with this process. So will workshopping, if your ego is up to the needed bruising. ;-)

But hey, that's just me.
~Dani

Literary Journal Class

I am so ecstatic about how much love the idea of a lit mag course has garnered on campus--I was student #5 to officially get an add code, and Dr Rosenberg said there are a few more students lined up to interview. Looks like we're really going to have a crew! I'm not sure what she's got on the docket, but I'm hoping that it's going to be a phenomenal group.

We're on the schedule--officially!--We're the very last class listed: http://www.washington.edu/students/timeschd/B/WIN2006/bis.html


If you're interested in the class, best email Dr Rosenberg soon! Class sign ups start tomorrow, I believe.

~Dani

Marshmallow

So, I was eating ghost Peeps in honor of Halloween and super-sizing my blood sugar levels, & I thought it would be funny to find a poem with marshmallow in it. This, when Googled, naturally turned up loads of crap...but wait! Could it be? A page dedicated to *Peeps Poems?!?!*

http://members.ync.net/pdunn/macgab/fun/fun-peep.htm

Oh yes. I'm not saying they're good. They are the brain-equivalent of eating a box o' Peeps.


~Dani