drafts, roughs/unfinished

 []

often I prefer poetry to be

not al dente but

al mooshy

[]

the waters of going down

and the waters of arising

rush to drown each other while

the carpenter planes at my broken hands

the shavings must be fingernails

that rub barbmime on the moon

while the world unworks itself

disentangles itself from the great thought

that engulfed it in rockets and roses

when a nosecone whimpers at Orpheus' door

and the ocean knocks knocks

on its driftwood to beg

directions home to my hammerlock lair

[]

there was not one wisp light enough

to waft me away to where I wanted

[]

how to build labyrinths

for lip-readers to run through

sprinting toward the riddle

unstoried as highheeled lecterns moviestars

lie slumped across

begging for sardonicisms

[]

to be married like Eva Braun when

after sharing the cake my spouse

shoots me in the head

is that better

than not getting wed

than ending up as a bachelor like me

[]

your blood stains the gulag

not sure what a gulag is

the misalliance of woman and man

[]

pratfall perfect the days

lucid screamings

the stuff that was once so chaff-lost

remains disgraceful descending

a staircase with a harsh-lit lipstick

on its helmet

[]

deflecting biographies

the red bicycle girl leaned on for solace

riding horses laced with kidgloves

and gongs tempo'd by harpsichord

a tame lamp lantern

the last train to bordertown

momentarily limping I went

paisley piano and lassid storm

the estuaries impassable

weeping into your cravat-sash

pearls thrown off in a gesture that

bares the chest for pajamas to purr

gliding fingers over the flesh

and its ballroom blindness

synonymous with cleft

crying silently at gates with black ruffles

launches and nipples entranced for years

at last one dies

shirtlessly noir approaching

the virginal bike-rack panic floorboards random

gleams from white pantages

marred by faceshots and crowns akimbo

receptions led them both to palpitate

expelled from his white lapels he stood

motionless mannered

venue of blue

vein of whore I never loved

venus abhorred a while and stared at passion

internally appalled complicity of

abandoning my birthlings

incompatible as a pair of twins

and a pair of dice

a one-in-six chance of winning

the vigilance of death attending often

the shoulderblades mad-dog lowcut

subtle gowned and drawn to castanets clicking

forgotten your remedies for the basic

foundation cloud clusters or boats

launched skywards
serenity the gods offered only

to Versailles 

///

befuddled

the December 2013 issue of of Poetry (Chicago) Magazine has some very interesting poems in it, and I thought to write a little about some of them, 

and I'll start with Louise Gluck.  Here are some lines from her 3 poems in this issue:

many months away

We could hear

the stiff sheets became

that time of life

—I could go on, and quote many other lines from the poems.  But that's enough for the moment, enough to promulgate my dilemma,

which is, that I don't understand them.  Take the first one for example:

many months away

—what does that mean?  No doubt it's my inadequacy as a reader and perhaps even as a human being that I have no idea what that line means.

Or "that time of life"— again, I'm totally at a loss.  What the heck is she getting at when she writes the line "that time of life"?   

Presumably she has an idea in her mind and is confident that it is being conveyed to the reader when she types out a line like 

the stiff sheets became

—but what that idea is and what she intends by it, is utterly incomprehensible to me.  

///

another feature poem from defunct blog

/

THE RETURN (after Follain: from Merwin/Romer)  

The sun has washed with white the farm that waits

in ways for the stranger who's late to come,

but he whose force was never sure of home

may not even pause when faced with its gates.

Clothed wholly in the mendicant's threadbare,

his headwear the tin lid of a trashcan,

he will know to announce himself as man

the prodigal: Hey guys it's me!  But where

the mule gnaws roots and the mare's coat burrs dark

and the pig guards the last milk it laps at,—

where the dog has a starred brow and the cat

can augur storms, they have formed their own ark.

Unyielding the response to him must be;

the same it has been since edenity.

Note:

I worked from the Stephen Romer and W. S. Merwin translations of Jean Follain's original.

/
This is one of the "transversions" from my book Homages.

In the case of this poem "by" Jean Follain, I worked from translations by Merwin and Romer (they are appended below).   Reading them, you can see what I've changed or added; in particular how I've "put back in" references to the biblical characters Adam and Noah, which Follain carefully left out.

It may seem odd that I've taken a poem which I assume is not rhymed in the original French version (I don't have the Follain text, but based on every poem of his I've ever seen I'm confident this one is similarly not end-rhymed)—why have I taken a vers libre and done this to it.  

But his poems are often sort of sonnety in their way.  Stephen Romer writes: 

"[Follain's] poems, very rarely more than fifteen lines or so in length, are vignettes . . . "  This is from the Introduction to 20th-Century French Poems (Faber, 2002) edited by Romer (see below for more Romer-on-Follain).  

That "fifteen lines" phrase struck me, and I suddenly wondered if quite a few of Follain's poems could be read as sonnets in subterfuge, and if so why not try doing a transversion in that mode  . . .

/ 

W. S. Merwin:

Welcome

On the farm in its full color

it is on a day of bright sunlight

that one awaits the stranger.

Dressed in fine black fabric

and wearing a top hat

he will push the gate open

saying friends here I am.

The donkey nibbling the blue thistle

the mare in her dark gown

the pig drinking sour milk

the dog with the starred forehead

the cat who can sense a storm

before him will be the same

as in hard Antiquity.

*

/

by Stephen Romer:

Welcome

In the freshly whitewashed farm

it is a sunny day

to be waiting for the stranger.

Clad in thin black cloth

and wearing a top hat

he will push the gate

and say friends here I am.

The donkey grazing on blue thistle

the mare with a dark coat

the pig drinking thin milk

the dog with the starred forehead

the cat sensitive to storms

will be the same before him

as in hard Antiquity.

*

*

Here's Stephen Romer on Follain:

Follain catches the instant and preserves it in aspic, or behind glass that is absolutely transparent: the speaker casts no shadow on his poems, which are rigourously impersonal in presentation—not once does Follain use the personal pronoun 'je', preferring always the neutral 'on'. . . . Perhaps no other poet of the century can suggest, with equal economy, such vertiginous and often desolating temporal perspectives.  Follain is also a crucial figure in providing a viable alternative to Surrealism, which he claimed to 'admire' but knew to be inimical to his own genius. . . . By reasserting the possibility of a poetry anchored in the world, and by inventing a new type of lyric poem, scoured of sentimentality and subjectivity, Jean Follain may prove, indeed, to be the major influence on the best [French] poets of the latter part of the century. . . .

(quoted from pages xxxiii/xxxiv of Romer's introduction to 20th-Century French Poems)

///

one more "feature poem" from defunct blog

/

ALOFT

when the balloon bursts
where does all the air
that was inside go

is it bound together briefly
by the moisture
of the human mouth
that birthed it

poor pouch of breath
long expulsion of nothing you
must dissipate too
nor remain intact
no matter how pantingly
against the outer atmosphere
you might try to secure your
whoosh-hold

and what an effort
what heave and heft-work
what strain of frame what rib-rift
to have to lift to shift around
all that oof and uff 

why strive and huff just
to stave off death
to survive
to be a substance a stuff

to live live as a pocket
a cluster
a cloud
to maintain your interior
mode

I can understand
that having once been
contained in bouyance
you'd want to retain
that rare coherence

you'd pray to stay a one
to remain a unity an
entity a whole in
this unencased heaven

but smatter of ghost 
how can you persist

or save yourself
when all us others disperse

so let it slough
dissolve in draft
little whistlewhiff
pathetic kisspuff
flimsiest flak

up into the sky goes
two lungs worth
of earth
unstrung
unloosed
the exhaled
soul of a boy a girl

alloonaloft
aloftalloon
lost



/
The air we breathe into our bodies keeps us alive of course at least until we expel the final lungsful of it and cease inhaling and die.  But in our lives most of the air we exhale is gone from us and disappears unless we blow it into something of some sort that will hold it for a while, a balloon in this case.  And some people have said that poetry, a poem, can sometimes retain it too.  If poetry is a voiced expression its words are inseparable perhaps from the breath that utters them, and songs are (or were, in earlier centuries) called "airs" . . .  to place one's air into an air that will survive is the ambition of the poet.  The balloon must eventually burst, and the air we blew into it will undergo its transformation (or return) into all the space or void the universe contains within its verse.   
In any case (or lack of it), I think the poem above is not that hard to understand, or I hope it isn't.  Except maybe the last stanza, which is just la la.  The dying mouth finds it difficult to form the complete words of what it's trying to say, and may only express their contour, or in its final entropy be able to pronounce them merely as partial parley.

///

feature poem from defunct blog

/
POEM

Soul to sing of all the Suicide-Ins

of the 1960s and how righteous

to invade the avarice palaces

at Evil Inc or government offices

and from our ponchos raise in unison

rainbow-antic canteens and gulp enough

morphiates for a fatal dose, then call

the media knowing that despite the crowd

ambulances and police arriving

to stomach-pump and IV most of us

back to life, inevitably, in the rushed

roulette of it there'd be casualties,

a few of us would always die each time,

peace we'd cry and keel over wondering,

hoping our perish action gained the eye

of a public busy with headline TV

and cause commuters to sip their coffee

slower, or a mom making breakfast grin,
the kids to hit each other ouch that hurts.

/
Someone emailed me recently about this poem, asking if it was based on real events or if I made it up.  The latter, actually.  The 1960s had Love-Ins and Sit-Ins and Be-Ins and Fillintheblank-Ins, which functioned variously as serious protests (much like the recent "Occupy" demonstrations) or as festival-like occasions, or sometimes both,

but not, as far as I know, Suicide-Ins.

While working on the poem I struggled with the end, wondering if I should present an imaginary contemporary version of a Suicide-In, but finally decided to have it occurring historically in the 1960s (which is why it's "mom" in line 18 rather than the gender-neutral "spouse" it would be if I were depicting a similar scene from today) . . .

//
Here's my addendum-attempt at trying to "update" it— you can see how something of this wouldn't have worked:

contrast with how

a Suicide-In would occur in terms of

today: a thousand poets each in their

lair before an iCam could skype gobble

communal lethal nepenthe in simulcast—

sprawled bards keeling over to protest

the NEA's shameful underfunding

of innovative oilspills, avantdrone missiles and
pocket-nukes, not to mention [........]

P.S.
Actually now I've been thinking about this "mom" in the penultimate line, I think I will change it to "spouse," mostly because of the word "ouch" in the next line.  The rhyme-sound of spouse/ouch works better, and I prefer the gender-neutrality of it also—

and 'spouse' is used in its final version, as it appears in my "Collected Poetry" book—

///

another featurepoem from defunct blog

POETIC LICENSE

When I pick up a new poetry book

I always glance first at the biographical note
If the poet has children I don't read the book

/

This "poem" if you can call it that, is not from any of the books [I've been publishing lately] . . . It is a segment from a book called "Nights of Naomi" which came out in the early 1970s and which I have no fondness for.  I've never reprinted most of the writing in it, and never will.  For me, those pages no longer exist.  If I could push a button and destroy every copy of that book, I would—only of course I don't need such a button, posterity will do the job for me just as utterly as any delete device.  

But as to this particular piece: why did I ever write such nihilist nonsense?  Why would I even think of such a thing to begin with, and then, having hatched it out of spite and envy and hatred of other's happiness in their marriages and parental pleasures and all the loving domesticities life had and has always denied me, having conceived its nasty note, why write it and print it?   My resentment and self-pity at not having, of never having had the opportunity of having, what "everybody else" had, has, a spouse, a marriage, a family— 

So the boy from the orphanage is going to spit at all that which "they"—all those fortunate others—enjoy.  The boy from the orphanage is going to write this "poem" which isn't a poem, but a curse.  And the evil he expresses is his in the end, rebounds on him with the fatal verdict time imposes on his vain vanished and vanishing words.

///

another 'feature' poem from defunct blog

DREAM AMID BED-WOODS

You must pull down sheets from these linen trees,
Blankets too, a pillowcase in full leaf,
But can't: to snooze amidst their fruits, beneath
The sheath of that composite canopy's

Roost, you must raise yourself past hammock heights—
Up where its deepest roots feel doubly sapped,
That dormitory orchard might lie wrapped
And ripe with you, whose foliage still invites

More lure of surface sleep.  But must you trust
The ease in these boughs, the sway of whose loft
So often now wakes vows to never rest,

To somehow remain alow, to resist
All berth above: you must push off this soft
Palleted grove, this tall, forest mattress.

 /
The theme here must be one of the oldest in the human mind.  The creatures from whom we are descended slept in trees, and surely we retain some vestige of that accommodation, far back in our psyches, our collective unconscious.  Children's fascination for and longing to inhabit tree-houses evinces it, and that desire, that urge to slumber up there in our earliest easement does still perhaps overcome us at times, especially in dreams—hence the "dream" of this poem.  Every forest is a dormitory for the atavistic being we're still evolving from, who emerges nightly in search of his true boudoir.  Every woods is a "bedwoods" for the backwoods boy in my brain.  But of course the poem's a sonnet, so it must turn at the volta and struggle against the octave's obsessions, and refute or question its imperatives.  "Must" appears in every stanza, to emphasize the conflict, which in one sense is the deathwish, the wombwish to regress into one's primeval impself.  
The lines are decasyllabic.  Rhyme ABBA CDDC for the quatrains, then EFE EFE for the tercets, but luckily I was able to slant the E's—trust/rest/resist/mattress—which (I thought, and still hope) softened them, slurred them in a sleepytime soundward, as a subliminal counterpoint to the rhetorical assertions of the concluding sentence of this two-sentence poem.

///