POEMS LIKE ME

lizpelly: this is a new projectFaye Orlove & I have been...

Wed, 01 May 2013 10:27:51 -0400

this is a new project

Faye Orlove & I have been working on it for the past month or so

it launches tonight around midnight

we are very excited

if you want to know why it’s called “The Media” i will talk your ear off about it sometime

how about @ our launch party? it’s this Friday @ Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge

Directive by Hayden Carruth

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:08:08 -0400

Let no imponderable lie
Transfix the sweetness of the eye,
Nor any waywardness command
A murder in the tranquil hand.
Only a careful gentleness
Of body binds the mind’s distress.

Traveller, There Is No Path by Antonio Machado

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 23:21:18 -0400

Everything passes on and everything remains,
But our lot is to pass on,
To go on making paths,
Paths across the sea.

I never sought glory,
Nor to leave my song
In the memory of man;
I love those subtle worlds,
Weightless and graceful,
As bubbles of soap.

I like to watch as they paint themselves
In sunlight and scarlet, floating
Beneath the blue sky, trembling
Suddenly then popping…

I never sought glory.

Traveller, your footprints
Are the path and nothing more;
Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking.

By walking the path is made
And when you look back
You’ll see a road
Never to be trodden again.

Traveller, there is no path,
Only trails across the sea…

Some time past in that place
Where today the forests are dressed in barbs
A poet was heard to cry
“Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…”

Beat by beat, verse by verse…

The poet died far from home.
He lies beneath the dust of a neighbouring land.
As he walked away he was seen to weep.
“Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…”

Beat by beat, verse by verse…

When the goldfinch cannot sing,
When the poet is a pilgrim,
When prayer will do us no good.
“Traveller, there is no path,
The path is made by walking…”

Beat by beat, verse by verse.

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children by Adrienne Rich

Sat, 28 Jul 2012 20:50:08 -0400

I was in danger of verbalizing my
moral impulses out of existence.
— Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. “The burning of a book,” he says, “arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book.”

Back there: the library, walled

with green Britannicas

Looking again

in Durer’s Complete Works

for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus

the Book of the Dead

the Trial of Jeanne d’Arc, so blue

I think, It is her color

and they take the book away

because I dream of her too often

love and fear in a house

knowledge of the oppressor

I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence

or few words

a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks

traced by my hand

or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue this slab of limestone

or reinforced concrete

fanatics and traders

dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred

that breathed once

in signals of smoke

sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor

this is the oppressor’s language

yet I need it to talk to you

3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes.

(the fracture of order

the repair of speech

to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet

after making love, speaking

of loneliness

relieved in a book

relived in a book

so on that page

the clot and fissure

of it appears

words of a man

in pain

a naked word

entering the clot

a hand grasping

through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us

has happened for centuries

we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy

outflung hand

beating bed

dryness of mouth

after panting

there are books that describe all this

and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house

there in that country

you find a temple

built eighteen hundred years ago

you enter without knowing

what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen

though the books tell everything

burn the texts said Artaud

5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.

Charles Olson Reads “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 16:13:15 -0500

Charles Olson Reads “Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27” (1966)

I'm Hot by Nick Demske

Sun, 15 Jan 2012 19:00:44 -0500

“Fire is inspirational.”

—Richard Pryor

For Jenetta

After Mims, ODB, Jeff Bezos & Danny Khalastchi

Because I’m on fire. Because I’m a church. Because I’m Richard Pryor. Because I’m Google search.

Because O snap, Branch Davidian Gideon, a real burner, cinder incinerate drunk tank caloric intake shake. And bake. And I helped.

I perpetuated the mythology. I forwarded the message. I researched the glottochronology, desperate for a great grandparent to blame. Awe shit!—I wrote a poem about “picnics” etymology, the practice of picking a nigger for lynching. The practice of coloring cluster munitions the same shade as aerial food drops.

Because I am stuck in the lotus position. Because I nuked the leftovers, back to the Stone Age. Because—opah, etc.—Lake Erie exploded. Because Michael Jackson and Pepsi and toasters and bathtubs. I’m hot. Because I’m fly, a fly, a 747 fly into a twin, I’m 808, I’m 212, I’m a kindle that spreads jungle fire like Amazon, consummates the info ecology. This is why comparisons are odious. This is why all explanations fail. Because it is real. Because it is real. Because coincidence is mythical as God. A tree falls in the forest and no one’s around. It feels self-conscious, a stereotype. O koan, I’m hot because the Hilton’s on fire. Because the conference center is burning! I’m the severed breasts of my warrior mother, an ambidextrous archer. And I am the shit the entrepreneurs have taken on her honor.

Because I have survived extraordinary violence. Because I’m sensitive, I’m passionate, spontaneous. You ain’t. Because you not. An equation elementary as water. A formula of misinformation, a river that flows like mother’s milk. Let me explain: because I drank the Molotov. Now I am the revolution. Because I myself am hell. Because I myself am the pollution wafting from the Iraqi National Library’s ashes. I’m hot. Because I’m fly. You ain’t. Because you not. This is why. This is why. This. Is. Why.

Nick Demske is 4 real. Thanks BOMBLOG for this. Check out Demske’s first book, Nick Demske, out with FENCE books. He blogs here.

MM

After a Greek Proverb by AE Stallings

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 16:45:00 -0500

Ουδέν μονιμότερον του προσωρινού

We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—
Just for a couple of years, we said, a dozen years back.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

We dine sitting on folding chairs—they were cheap but cheery.
We’ve taped the broken window pane. TV’s still out of whack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query.

When we crossed the water, we only brought what we could carry,
But there are always boxes that you never do unpack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Sometimes when I’m feeling weepy, you propose a theory:
Nostalgia and tear gas have the same acrid smack.
We’re here for the time being, I answer to the query—

We stash bones in the closet when we don’t have time to bury,
Stuff receipts in envelopes, file papers in a stack.
Nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

Twelve years now and we’re still eating off the ordinary:
We left our wedding china behind, afraid that it might crack.
We’re here for the time being, we answer to the query,
But nothing is more permanent than the temporary.

From the first issue of the 100th year of Poetry magazine.

From "The Propositions" by Robert Duncan

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:39:00 -0500

3.

This is THE SENDING OUT.

I see the tree.   It changes.   Mineral
        vegetable   animal.   Of generations.
It exceeds me.

                              Come back. Come back.
Tell us of excess.
       What was the sign that limited?

Do not serve the tree.
This is the sending.

This place is littered with great stones.

       No more!    Return to the shore
we remember.   Do not go beyond our knowledge.

       Bring back that black thing.
       we did not have in our story.
       It alone to speak, to give strangeness.

In the field of the poem   the unexpected
       must come.

                         We wait.
                         It does not come.

There is a disturbance in the House.
I had forgotten its orders. The plants
      ask to be waterd.

If we have not set things to rights,
       the indwelling
is not with us, there are no instructions.

MM

January First by Octavio Pas trans. Elizabeth Bishop

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:56:00 -0500

The year’s doors open
like those of language,
toward the unknown.
Last night you told me:
tomorrow
we shall have to think up signs,
sketch a landscape, fabricate a plan
on the double page
of day and paper.
Tomorrow we shall have to invent,
once more,
the reality of this world.

I opened my eyes late.
For a second of a second
I felt what the Aztec felt,
on the crest of the promontory,
lying in wait
for time’s uncertain return
through crack in the horizon.

But no, the year had returned.
It filled all the room
and my look almost touched it.
Time, with no help from us,
had placed
in exactly the same order as yesterday
houses in the empty street,
snow on the houses,
silence on the snow.

You were beside me,
still asleep.
The day had invented you
but you hadn’t yet accepted
being invented by the day.
- Nor possibly my being invented, either.
You were in another day.

You were beside me
and I saw you, like the snow,
asleep among appearances.
Time, with no help from us.
invents houses, streets, trees
and sleeping women.

When you open you eyes
we’ll walk, once more,
among the hours and their inventions.
We’ll walk among appearances
and bear witness to time and its conjugations.
Perhaps we’ll open the day’s door.
And then we shall enter the unknown.

Cambridge, Mass., 1 January 1975

Erthe Toc of Erthe or Earth Took of Earth by Anonymous

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:33:54 -0500

Erthe toc of erthe erthe wyth woh,
erthe other erthe to the earthe droh,
erthe leyde erthe in erthene throh,
tho hevede erthe of erthe erthe ynoh.

Earth took of earth earth with ill;
Earth other earth gave earth with a will.
Earth laid earth in the earth stock-still:
Then earth in earth had of earth its fill.

ca 13th Century

An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, XXX by Wallace Stevens

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:05:00 -0500

The last leaf that is going to fall has fallen.

The robins are la-bas, the squirrels, in tree-caves,

Huddle together in the knowledge of squirrels.

The wind has blown the silence of summer away.

It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground:

In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected.

The barrenness that appears is an exposing.

It is not part of what is absent, a halt

For farewells, a sad hanging on for remembrances.

It is a coming on and a coming forth.

The pines that were fans and fragrances emerge,

Staked solidly in a gusty grappling with rocks.

The glass of the air becomes an element—

It was something imagined that has been washed away.

A clearness has returned. It stands restored.

It is not an empty clearness, a bottomless sight.

It is a visibility of thought,

In which hundreds of eyes, in one mind, see at once.

Thankful for friends, here and there. —NW

As I Walked Out One Evening by W.H. Auden

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:48:50 -0400

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

New York, New York by David Berman

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 23:28:00 -0400

A second New York is being built
a little west of the old one.
Why another, no one asks,
just built it, and they do.

The city is still closed off
to all but the work crews
who claim it’s a perfect mirror image.

Truthfully, each man works on the replica
of the apartment building lives in,
adding new touches,
like cologne dispensers, rock gardens,
and doorknobs marked for the grand hotels.

Improvements here and there, done secretly
and off the books. None of the supervisors
notice or mind. Everyone’s in a wonderful mood,
joking, taking walks through the still streets
that the single reporter allowed inside has describes as

“unleavened with reminders of the old city’s complicated past,
but giving off some blue perfume from the early years on earth.”

The men grow to love the peaceful town.
It becomes more difficult to return home at night,

which sets the wives to worrying.
The yellow soups are cold, the sunsets quick.

The men take long breaks on the fire escapes,
waving across the quiet spaces to other workers
meditating on the perches.

Until one day…

The sky filled with charred clouds.
Toolbelts rattle in the rising wind.

Something is wrong.

A foreman stands in the avenue
pointing binoculars at a massive gray mark
moving towards us in the eastern sky.

Several voices, What, What is it?

Pigeons, he yells through the wind.

David Berman rules. Frontman for the Silver Jews, poet, and son of an evil corporate lobbyist. Berman, on the day he broke up the band in 2002, posted a letter (halfway down the page) to his fans about his “gravest secret,” and proceeded to lambast his father for being both a “human molester” and a “doltish thinker.” In light of the Occupy Wall Street movement afoot, his words, both poetic and not, are more prescient than ever. Check out his book, Actual Air.

The Unbeliever by Elizabeth Bishop

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 13:19:45 -0400

He sleeps on the top of a mast. - Bunyan

He sleeps on the top of a mast
with his eyes fast closed.
The sails fall away below him
like the sheets of his bed,
leaving out in the air of the night the sleeper’s head.

Asleep he was transported there,
asleep he curled
in a gilded ball on the mast’s top,
or climbed inside
a gilded bird, or blindly seated himself astride.

“I am founded on marble pillars,”
said a cloud. “I never move.
See the pillars there in the sea?”
Secure in introspection
he peers at the watery pillars of his reflection.

A gull had wings under his
and remarked that the air
was “like marble.” He said: “Up here
I tower through the sky
for the marble wings on my tower-top fly.”

But he sleeps on the top of his mast
with his eyes closed tight.
The gull inquired into his dream,
which was, “I must not fall.
The spangled sea below wants me to fall.
It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.”

The Layers by Stanley Kunitz

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 18:11:01 -0400

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

This was sent to me by a very good old friend—NW

Promised Land Valley, June '73 by Alfred Corn

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 20:31:00 -0400

The lake at nightfall is less a lake,
but more, with reflection added, so
this giant inkblot lies on its side,
a bristling zone of black pine and fir
at the dark fold of the revealed world.

     Interpret this fallen symmetry,
scan this water and these water lights,
and follow a golden scribble toward
the lantern, the guessed boat, the voices
that skip across sky to where we stand.

     You are vanishing and so am I
as everything surrenders color,
falling silent to vision. Darkness
rises to drown out the sky and silence
names us to the asking boat.

     Who echoes who in the black mirror?
Riddles are answers here at the edge.
And still, we can imagine some clear call,
a spoken brilliance blazing the trail …
ourselves moving out across the sky.

On the Beach at Night Alone by Walt Whitman

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 12:04:24 -0400

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro, singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes, and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies, though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed, or may exist, on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

for women who are difficult to love. by Warsan Shire

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 15:58:46 -0400

you are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?
closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.

Reblogged from Liberator Magazine. Warsan Shire tumbls here and blogs here.

Jiang Kui by Jeffrey Yang

Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:38:03 -0400

Jing Wang translates Jiang Kui
of the Northern Song: “In writing poetry,
it is better to strive to be different
from the ancients than to seek to be
identical to them. But better still than
striving to be different is to be bound
to find one’s own identity with them,
without striving to identify;
and to be bound to differ with them,
without striving to differ.”

Check out Jeffrey Yang’s super rad collection An Aquarium available through Greywolf Press.

MM

Check out my new poem published in The Open End, an online collaborative journal. - Mitch

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 11:56:00 -0400

Check out my new poem published in The Open End, an online collaborative journal.

- Mitch