Category Archives: poetry

poetry

Alice was eating grapes in the park when…

she learned that Poetry Magazine is hosting the 4th Annual Printer’s Ball at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art on August 22nd, including a staged reading of a radio play by Yehuda Amichai and something about which I can only speculate called the “Gnoetry poetry machine” – it reminds me of the Curious Sofa. I’ll have to wait and find out!

The Printers’ Ball is an annual celebration of print literature in Chicago, hosted by Newcity, Poetry, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), in collaboration with CHIRP, MAKE: A Chicago Literary Magazine, Proximity Magazine, Stop Smiling, Venus Zine, and over 100 local literary organizations. The event showcases a diverse selection of print publications, available free of charge, including magazines, journals, weeklies, posters, and broadsides, plus a full night of live entertainment.

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poetry

bearded poems

I read the March poems written by the two E’s – Ellen and Emma – with whom I trade poems, without any idea of which one wrote which one. Usually, I would know by style, but this time they each hit close to a certain bone and I can’t tell whose is whose.

Not only does this make me evaluate them both more fairly, in my mind, their authorship becomes collective.

Somehow their styles merge, and I attribute to each of them – and to both poems – the respective poetic histories of BOTH writers.

I think this has not a little to do with seeing BEARD OF AVON. To have uncertain authorship is an interpretive gift. If any author is possible, all possibilities are possible.

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poetry

What’s in a name?

CXXXVI.

If thy soul cheque thee that I come so near,
Swear to thy blind soul that I was thy ‘Will,’
And will, thy soul knows, is admitted there;
Thus far for love my love-suit, sweet, fulfil.
‘Will’ will fulfil the treasure of thy love,
Ay, fill it full with wills, and my will one.
In things of great receipt with ease we prove
Among a number one is reckon’d none:
Then in the number let me pass untold,
Though in thy stores’ account I one must be;
For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold
That nothing me, a something sweet to thee:
Make but my name thy love, and love that still,
And then thou lovest me, for my name is ‘Will.’

(This is not my favorite sonnet in terms of poetry, but it is in audacity. “For nothing hold me, so it please thee hold / that nothing me…” I also like the way he can make language justify anything. “Words mean what I want them to mean.”

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convergence, dance, poetry, rhyme

The sonnet arabesque

Yesterday Robert and I met with a composer who writes vocal and other art music, who wants to put her dissertation music together with a ballet in next year’s Convergence.

And last night I saw a performance at Butler Ballet of five short works, including Cynthia Pratt’s RAINMAKERS and Paul Taylor’s CLOVEN KINGDOM. This was the first time in my life I’d ever sat down for an entire evening of ballet. I was blown away by it. Halfway through RAINMAKERS, I had renounced words and spoken vocabulary. I’ve never had so much visual stimulus in my life. Where have I been that I haven’t seen this yet?

I have very few words about this experience, I feel like I should be dancing about it, instead of writing, but here’s a try: the conventions are so different – the lighting so aesthetic as opposed to narrative. The transitions, which I care so much about, seem so insignificant. ‘

The permeable stage, with the wings as flimsy as air, with endless streams of dancers rushing in and out.

The use of the body. The arm is the quotation mark of the word-body – it is much less significant than I want it to be.

The foot is the face, meaning emanates from there, and the face might as well be masked.

And finally, dance got there first. Before we (theater) did.

Then I got to meet some local Indy folks from the ballet community, including a gentleman who kills his own deer (to eat) with a bow and arrow, and has a quiver made out of a coyote he also hunted himself. We sat around a fire talking about fighting hummingbirds, dance, hip replacement surgery, and poetry till morning. One of the people there was writing her first sonnets. I’m going to send her these two poems.

It was beautiful to be in their home, looking at paint samples, eating leftover Dove Valentine’s chocolates with fortunes on the inside (mine was “You will make someone melt today,” but I read it at 11:50 pm) and pretending to have a place I live somewhere in this world. But I was reminded, while touching the coyote’s fur, that I never would have met these people if I were living so stably and simply somewhere. This is part of the journey. Ballet, bittersweet, and all.

If there’s anything in the world of words that can stand up to RAINMAKERS, it’s this poem. Ballet is rhyme, I think – that’s the only compliment I have for it. The repetition of elements chimes the same way.

The Windhover
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

And this link to Harryette Mullen reading THE DIM LADY., her The Dark Lady takeoff.

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poetry

I yam what I yam

CXXI.

‘Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being,
And the just pleasure lost which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling but by others’ seeing:
For why should others false adulterate eyes
Give salutation to my sportive blood?
Or on my frailties why are frailer spies,
Which in their wills count bad what I think good?
No, I am that I am, and they that level
At my abuses reckon up their own:
I may be straight, though they themselves be bevel;
By their rank thoughts my deeds must not be shown;
Unless this general evil they maintain,
All men are bad, and in their badness reign.

Shakespeare: now stealing from Popeye. By the way, I really love the use of the word “bevel” in this, and the one-word-per-beat line: “Which in their wills count bad what I think good”. I know there’s a word for that, and SK would know it, and maybe in my NEXT year of assistant directing I’ll know the words for all the rhetorical devices. (Maybe.)

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poetry

caveat

I wrote that last post about “Travel” before realizing that her rhythm was actually much more sophisticated than anything I used in my rhyming period. But something like that is what I thought I was writing. Of course, I was writing something much, much worse.

Joel took me to task on metrical grounds when he read my TIME TO RHYME copy, and I remember being frustrated with him. It had been so hard to write the whole thing in rhyme in the first place, let alone worry about meter. But although I wasn’t ready to hear it at the time, I think I can take that as the compliment it was – that he knew I was capable of more, and should have been doing better. Or, maybe not should have, but ought to in the future.

How hard it is is never the point. It’s supposed to be hard.

I wonder why it is that I’ve avoided meter, even to the point of consciously trying to forget the names of the various feet. I think it’s that I’d rather understand it aurally, and I thought there was something fake about people who learned meter out of feet in a book. But that particular mental subterfuge has run its course. I need the technique now.

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poetry, rhyme, travel

“Travel”

The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.

All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And hear its engine steaming.

My heart is warm with friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing;
Yet there isn’t a train I’d rather take,
No matter where it’s going.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay

There was a time when I thought that to write poetry in the rhythm, form, and shape shown above was not only my highest ambition, it was my only one. I was so prolific in it – I wrote 365 poems (ANIMA’S DAYS) plus a bunch more, three plays (FAUST adaptation, GILGAMESH, CLYTEMNESTRA SPEAKS) , and a 200-page thesis (TIME TO RHYME) in that exact poetic form. And that’s only what I remember. I was the monotonous and versatile balladeer. I still have a lot of affection for that structure, if only because we’ve traveled so far together – but these days, to make myself write like that now, I have to, well, make myself write like that.

There isn’t even a category for “rhyme” on this blog. I’ll create one, for old time’s sake, but I don’t know how much it’ll get used. I have been trying to write a tetrameter sonnet lately, and it’s killing me. Not that I can’t do it – I can do it easily – but I can’t do it WELL. I used to use that form so thoughtlessly, but it was like using a blender to brush your hair.

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