RAISED UP

Beth Roberts

From the dual fists of the church, small and white,
you undertsand the stuff of beauty

dripping Jesus to be (in the flesh understand, hand-
to-mouth understanding) as a page, dissolving undeserved.

And as you empty the thought or fill the feel,
you surround the hole of the mouth that wells up

and understand: Jesus in the middle of the night,
star-crossed on a high road with a mouthful of this.

***
from Brief Moral History in Blue

BETWEEN BREATHS


First, one of my favorite (entertaining) essays about poetry--
at least tangentially about poetry--posted today because August
Kleinzahler's new book was reviewed yesterday in the New
York Times and whenever Kleinzahler's name is mentioned
anymore the Nanny element in American Poetry gets all up in
arms about how nasty he was in it. I'd say impassioned,
and I'd say, AK is right--Poetry is not good for you. And I mean,
in the same way that driving a motorcycle way over the speed
limit is not good for you (but really worth doing).
So PLEASE don't read it on the air as if it's something we
could really use if we want to live thoughtful lives . . .
At the same time I suppose AK goes a little overboard
with the hog farm metaphor, since I studied poetry
in an MFA program and would again if given the chance.
But that's because I'm half crazy--not some wonderful citizen--
and poetry is one of the most intense and entertaining
experiences around--writing it, reading it--if you stick around,
dig for the good stuff, live within a fixed budget, etc.

Sleeping It Off In Rapid City, the AK selected just out, is
a hell of a lot of fun, by the way.

Also, Krugman on the American public and the economy.

Great,


" . . . the solar text message. Can the blond moron with straw
in her ears please come get your son? He's fucking up the
solstice party. And now the boy with his hand on a guitar.
He came right out of another one, childhood love like little
chainsaws. Sit down and shut up. Every piece of paper has a
crazy word written on it. Quit crying every time the birds fly
away. You're not eleven. And quit grimacing. Suicide isn't
romantic. When you watch a robin, and who has the time to
watch robins anymore, perhaps you should notice how it silently
goes about its (happy) business. Stupid, but not necessarily
like those on disability--the back goes out, the brain goes
south--is the scarecrow, heading south, with her friend, the
suicidal maniac."

Spider Pine

The blog here, formally a class blog,
will be used to post the occasional exercise,
or what have you, for those in need of
a fix from time to time. One is posted there
now, for example.

Becker


Here's a link to Priscilla Becker reading remarkable poems
from her first, out of print now, book. Thanks to Tom
Hoffman.

Hejinian vs. Dobyns

interesting little article here,
followed by an odd little
defense of Dobyns by Louise
Gluck here . . .

EXLEY


I'm short on words, hand me the aspirin,
and yet a conversation with Brock Clarke
last night brought me back to the joy--I guess
that's the correct word in this case--that comes with
discovering a new writer. I say I GUESS simply
because Fred Exley, author of the amazing
A Fan's Notes, is a rather appalling person
(as presented in A Fan's Notes),
and the book is billed as a "Fictional Memoir."
No one ever told me about Exley--like most
of my favorite contemporary fiction I found
the book by accident. (Back in the Day, when
dinosuars roamed the earth, one could find good
books to read by literally walking around a bookstore
and PICKING STUFF up off tables.)
Anyway, I knew I was on to something (but what?)
a few hours later when I couldn't stop reading.
The prose is beautiful, and moving,
and it doesn't feel the least bit confessional.
It has been a while since I read it, and I read
the three books in Ex's autobiographical
trilogy (and liked them all). For more on
Exley and A Fan's Notes go to this link.

Confession

Stephen Dobyns


The Nazi within me thinks it's time to take charge.
The world's a mess; people are crazy.
The Nazi within me wants windows shut tight,
new locks put on the doors. There's too much
fresh air, too much coming and going.
The Nazi within me wants more respect. He wants
the only TV camera, the only bank account,
the only really pretty girl. The Nazi within me
wants to be boss of traffic and traffic lights.
People drive too fast; they take up too much space.
The Nazi within me thinks people are getting away
with murder. He wants to be the boss of murder.
He wants to be boss of bananas, boss of white bread.
The Nazi within me wants uniforms for everyone.
He wants them to wash their hands, sit up straight,
pay strict attention. He wants to make certain
they say yes when he says yes, no when he says no.
He imagines everybody sitting in straight chairs,
people all over the world sitting in straight chairs.
Are you ready? he asks them. They say they are ready.
Are you ready to be happy? he asks them. They say
they are ready to be happy. The Nazi within me wants
everyone to be happy but not too happy and definitely
not noisy. No singing, no dancing, no carrying on.

The Chaos; the long walk several times each day after; the medicine

LAKE GENESERATH


orangutans

an oddity by any measure--

a seminal experience

breakthrough surrounded by strollers

a ring of ice blue in the wolf's eye . . .

phlebotomist takes a bite of salad

a fissure in the vein

the face you imagine contorts beneath your own

Poke, someone says in a child's voice . . .

Way out in the mist of some lake an animal shoots itself

nobody speaks

his boat is one thing to love

the only thing moving for miles

HAIKUS BY NEIL (Kelly)


Disc golfer par three
0between hundreds of pine trees
Reached the pin in two

00000000000000000000000Marvelous spring rain
000000000000000000000000poured reluctantly outside
00000000000000000000000Boozed it up inside

Beer bonging day has
0approached this year once again
Locate a funnel

000000000000000000000000Funeral death dance
0000000000000000000000000shuffling down Park Avenue
000000000000000000000000Past Manicured trees

Wooden Dutch shoe trend
0style setter board walker
Bleached blonde and blue eyed

000000000000000000000000Breathing and fucking
0000000000000000000000000are natural processions
000000000000000000000000Naked on fall leaves

Fast food beer belly
0ass crack exposed everyday
Refreshing draft felt

***

just a few out of 50 or so . . .

ROADS

Rick Lyon

The main road's the same one called by another name--
in Essex, it's the Saybrook road, in Saybrook the Essex
oooroad--
it's what you're oriented towards.
When they changed the route number, we learned
ooothe new one, slowly.
Tonight there's nothing to learn.
The moist air's so heavy it sags over the waterfront,
cloud-like, refusing to rain.
All the boats, docks, buildings, and trees make a dark
oooground now
where the fog-haloed lights and their long reflections
oooacross the water
hold us, our arguments and griefs,
in a mild forgetful August mist,
and then the hard rain finds us.

***
from Bell 8

poem by Norman Dubie

The World Isn't a Wedding of the Artists of Yesterday


00000000They were with me, and they were me . . .
00000000As we all moved forward in a consonance
000000000000silent and moving
000000000000Seated and gazing,
0000000000000000Upon the beautiful river forever.

00000000000000DELMORE SCHWARTZ


A stub of red pencil in your hand.

A landscape rising beyond
The carcass Of black larkspur,
Beyond the Milky Way where
The lights of galaxies are strung out over a dipper of gin
With a large sun and the rotund

Fuchsia moon. Her closet is empty, except for the manuscript
With your signature. She has left you!
Where was it in the field
That you threw the telephone:
After moving away
From the farmhouse, you found it again when
Returning for the lost cat—

As you walked through the low chinaberries calling
Her name you found the white horn
Of the telephone. You are alone calling to the frozen
Countryside of New Jersey.
She sleeps
In the yellow wicks of the meadow:
You are calling the mopsy cat back
From the ditch, but Dexedrine presses a pencil
Up against your eyebrow and temple. And
You've forgotten—what was it?
Out there in the field calling

Across the cold night air, drinking from the gold flask,
Again tucking that stub of a pencil
Back behind your ear. You read, this morning,
In the crisp pica lettering of the old Remington
How boatmen navigated the winter shallows of the Seine
Guided by a lamp burning all night
In a narrow window in Flaubert's study;

And all of a sudden, under severe stars, beside water,
You remembered everyone who was a friend.

But why your hand is locked on a red pencil, again,
At the bottom of a wintry meadow, in New Jersey,

Is the mystery rising behind you on a wind.

Julie Moulds Rybicki 12/28/62--4/8/08

When Bad Angels Love Women

When the bad angel loves
the woman next door,
the motion wakes me.
The tip of one of his
purple-veined wings
moves right through our walls.
It lifts and falls
as the two of them, a wind
like blue leather pulsing
through this house.
She packs cartons
of eggs like I do, during days,
with other women and boys
on a line. But home,
there is this angel.
His kiss, like a scorpion's,
marks her now, and suddenly
I have seen her tilting
out of time. When her
night voice winds
like a leather wind,
I know he is there.
She goes to him now
and he eats her
like a young apple,
the way men eat a woman
in a dark alley
until she is gone.
One day, he is with her always
his windy presence
rolling the eggs
from our cartons.
The ladies and I are tired
of all this breaking;
tired of seeing dollar-sized
bites disappear
from her neck. She
is the color of blueberries
on cheesecloth.
Antlers of the bones
of wings break her back.
Luminescent, like blue neon,
she tries to fill her cartons,
but the eggs
slip through her hands.
I could hear him each night
eat her soul,
I say to the ladies on the line
the day she disappears.
The whole house could hear
while we stacked
our wet plates,
his giant wings spreading
like a fan.

***

poem by Julie Moulds Rybicki

A Small Number

Olena Kalytiak Davis

So far, have managed, Not
Much. So far, a few fractures, a few factions, a Few
Friends. So far, a husband, a husbandry, Nothing
Too complex, so far, followed the Simple
Instructions. Read them twice. So far, memorized three Moments,
Buried a couple deaths, those turning faces. So far, two or Three
Sonnets. So far, some berrigan and Some
Keats. So far, a scanty list. So far, a dark wood. So far, Anti-
Thesis and then, maybe, a little thesis. So far, a small Number
Of emily’s letters. So far, tim not dead. So far, Matt
Not dead. So far, jim. So far, Love
And love, not so far. Not so love. So far, no-Hope.
So far, all face. So far, scrapped and scraped, but Not
With grace. So far, not Very.

(reprint from Agni 51)

Milk

Kate Northrup

There is something blue about it
and believe me, you can't trust it. Inside,
a wide field, sky, a few stones
by the road overgrown and out of that,
a city flowers, it breaks

into avenues and apartments. People meet each other
while strolling. Good Day, Good Morning. Later
they will couple,

they will clutch & cling, they will marry
& twist into strange
positions, strange in their beds,

in their own strange apartments. And later, years later,
there will be crickets, a kind of silence,

there will be pale stones in a field
of pale grass growing over.

"the smell of a blanket"

Larry Eigner

the smell of a blanket
oohow like
oohow different
owhen you were a child
oooothose years

ooplanes cross going places

TWO BY LORINE NIEDECKER


Mother is dead

The branches' snow is like the cotton fluff
she wore in her aching ears. In this deaf huff
after the storm shall we speak of love?

As my absent father's distrait wife
she worked for us--knew us by sight.

We know her now by the way the snow
protects the plants before they go.


The graves

You were my mother, thorn apple bush,
armed against life's raw push.
But you my father catalpa tree
stood serene as now--he refused to see
that the other woman, the hummer he shaded
hotly cared
for his purse petals falling--
his mind in the air.

Twenty-Three

Liam Rector

When he was 23 and beautiful
He liked to hang around
With other beautiful people.

He liked to get intoxicated with them,
Have sex with them, make money
With them. Among them,

He found, one did not have to strain.
Other people
Wanted to hang around with them

And came bearing gifts,
A little something. (These
Gift-bearers were a lot like

Politics itself is, "Showbiz
For ugly people.") In this world
If anything went wrong there

Was always enough money around
To cover it. After he was through
With this crowd he started hanging

Out with a bunch of academic
Gangsters. These were
A different crew altogether:

Smart, on the main, but mean
And eaten alive by resentment.
They never had enough money

And were bitter beyond belief,
Compared, say,
To a troupe of electricians.

Freud said somewhere
In our unconscious
We are always 23.

***
from Executive Director of the Fallen World

rocking horse etc

JOE THE LION

Cynthia Cruz

Ruined at the Greyhound,
Mania, God's sweet basement
Meth, flooding every cell in your brain.
Your ticket to Cleveland
Soft with sweat and crumpled
In your small-girl hands.
Thin, then, on a music
So terrible. And black,
Your hair cut short to soft mohawk.

You knew I sold
My blood for money. And for love,
I've done things I'd rather not say.
I'd do anything not to be human,
If this is what it is.

***
from Ruin

YONDER STANDS YOUR ORPHAN (Novel excerpt)

Barry Hannah

"In her nurse's outfit, white stockings, white shoes,
she was a form of wreckage too. When she walked
away from the old men at Onward, they witnssed
the struggle of her rumpcheeks in the skirt and they
knew hurt, even terror, and vast pity for themselves.
She did not patronize them, never called them
sweetheart or boyfriend, these convicts of time.
She did not mean to harm them. They were all right,
they were reality, they knew their place, deaf and aiming
monologues out the window and across the river
at Louisiana. The democracy of the pained, the fearful,
the unheard. She was gentle and content to be the young
beauty among them. On whom they fastened the dopey
old fogs of their desire."

Epitaph on a Tyrant

by W. H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

***

Personism: A Manifesto (an excerpt)

Frank O’Hara


Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding
like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write
to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets
thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading
is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don’t believe
in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded
structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t
even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on
your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street
with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout,
"Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

The Happiest Being On Earth (or in Indiana anyway)

HUNTING AND GATHERING


Backwards, the un-crushed crown

swatches of dyed
cloth on the backs of
the African vultures

(count them: three sisters)

blurred light between leaves

There, the thing
looks to the left!

It walks so close to the camera

the smell of its ribs
and the soft fatherly skin

that smell in the air--

the Okefenokee Swamp

the mother's eyes still painted on the cone of her head

(she's no longer upset)

Harsh word, love

the six of them heading out to the pig roast

a spring in the back
and a wind-up key

eel lizard deer horse elephant . . .

evolution is a napkin

the one that drifts down on the sleeping man's face