Category Archives: poetry

poetry, writing

rather than words

TRYPEWRITER
TRYPE

I was going to make a line from High Windows, by Philip Larkin, the new What Do You Want On Your Tombstone for this site, but have decided, instead, on the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, arranged in the un-ergonomic order of the keyboard. Text, text, text.

High Windows is the first anything I encountered that made me aware that there might be something greater than, or beyond, the artistic mega-vitality of words – something that could not be expressed in words. (And what is that, Philip? Sex! Sex without societal constraints!)

Before I read High Windows, I used to write A WORD IS WORTH A THOUSAND PICTURES on my notebooks, like a radical textualist. After that poem, my notion of textual-artistic dominance was troubled.

My nineteen-year-old response to the poem, which, unfortunately, I remember, reads like this: “Yes. Rather than words. Because WORDS ARE THE DEFAULT FOR WHAT MUST BE THERE. Yes, yes, yes.”

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a propos of nothing, poetry, theater

she came in through the bathroom window

If I keep moving into other fields, I’m going to have to stop calling theater “the field.” I just got off the phone with another poet who entered poetry through the back door (side door, garden hedge, etc). In her case, she came from the world of music. We talked about the fear of leaving behind what you’ve worked so hard on. Unspoken between us, but louder than anything we spoke, was the truth that performance fields are so much more difficult to live in, and that the choice to move towards poetry was, in some part, a choice to move towards sanity.

I met someone at a party two nights ago who said “Wow. Poetry. That’s a hard life.” We’ll see if he’s right.

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poetry

nothing further to report: the last poem of 08

Joel Brouwer’s A REPORT TO AN ACADEMY, from the 12/06 POETRY. You can also hear him pick his seven favorite love poems , or read more of his POETRYies. I have nothing to add to it. It seems to me like a poem that cannot be improved. I can’t say the same thing about 2008 – but then, I have nothing to add to it, either. Perhaps in that respect it is perfect, in that it is complete.

A Report to an Academy
by Joel Brouwer

And so among the starry refineries
and cattail ditches of New Jersey
his bus dips from egg-white sky into shadow.
When he next looks up from Kafka a blur
of green sanatorium tile flows by
then presto, Port Authority, full daylight.
He has been cheated of the river, dawn,
a considered fingering of his long
and polished rosary of second thoughts.
Is it any wonder children are born
weeping? Out to Eighth Avenue to walk
twenty blocks home to her sleeping curve
beneath a sheet. He cracks three eggs into
a bowl and says to each, Oh you got trouble?
The yellow yolk is his, the orange is hers,
the third simply glistens, noncommittal.
Except to mention Kafka’s restlessness
before his death, his trips from spa to spa
to country house to sanatorium,
and that she’s awake now, sweet with sleep sweat,
patting her belly’s taut carapace and yes
hungry as an ape but first a kiss mister
how was your trip and what have you brought us,
and that the knowledge that dooms a marriage
is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage,
the poem has nothing further to report.

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friday poem, poetry

belated boxing day / friday poem

The Parents Poem

It’s a good idea to figure what to do with parents.
One man I knew, after caring for them for years,
Led them across a busy street—two lines of traffic.
He started a lost colony for his parents.

He bought them big boots and pith helmets.
He sent his parents into battle. He dressed
Them in Austrian uniforms and gave them
Maps of Russia. No one ever saw them again.

Another man built a furnace and put his parents
Into it. He got some tincture, and tried to tran-
Substantiate his parents. It took a long time
And used a lot of heat, but there wasn’t much change.

A neighbor stored them in an empty cistern—the ladder
Is still sticking out. He took them to Kenya
And got his parents to take a walk with the elephants.
And they died all right . . . But by the end,

They knew for sure that they’d had children.

– Robert Bly, in the Fall 08 Paris Review.

This poem gets to me a bit – I almost wasn’t sure whether to put it up. The furnace, and all that. But I think if it gets under my skin this much, it must be good. It’s a good example of what a friend and I were discussing recently – how to write a poem about something depressing without writing a poem that depresses.

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poetry

Supersonnet

Trying to make a poem fit into a page limit, I cut out all the stanza breaks except the one that seems essential. The result: two enormous stanzas, one of forty lines, one of twenty. Now if it was 40:30, it’d be some kind of gargantuan sonnet: an enormous poem in the proportions of 4:3. But I still think it’s a cool form.

Stanza breaks mean so much less to me now. It’s like everything I write could go as well in couplets, or triplets, or whatever. This is a state of affairs I never could have imagined when I was eighteen.

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poetry, quotes

sweet nothings

I’m writing a poem with some variations on the word “nothing.” Yes, this has been done before. Before, before, and before.

Romeo is banished; and all the world to nothing that he dares ne’er come back to challenge you; or if he do, it needs must be by stealth. Then, since the case so stands as now it doth, I think it best you marry with the county.
– Nurse, ROMEO AND JULIET
(By the way, there’s an old movie called All The World To Nothing, from 1918 – I was hoping to steal that title myself.)

Nothing will come of nothing: speak again.
– Lear, KING LEAR

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
of laughing with a sigh? – a note infallible
Of breaking honesty? – horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.
– Leontes, THE WINTER’S TALE

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friday poem, poetry

friday, you know what that means.

THEOLOGY

No, the serpent did not
seduce Eve to the apple.
All that’s simply
Corruption of the facts.

Adam ate the apple.
Eve ate Adam.
The serpent ate Eve.
This is the dark intestine.

The serpent, meanwhile,
Sleeps his meal off in Paradise-
Smiling to hear
God’s querulous calling.

-Ted Hughes

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