Most of the others in my writing workshop took a lit class in “the uncanny.” When we read stories, they always see that. They see the blurring of dreams and reality; they see the Gothic. I, on the other hand, watch a lot of detective shows. I read, seeing crime. Get out the yellow tape.
At Kim Stafford’s poetry workshop I accidentally wrote a poem that told a secret even though I wasn’t thinking of the secret and when it came time to share what we had written I read something else. Is this what poems do—make you say things you want to keep hidden? It is ok to keep some things hidden which just means private as long as you know what they are. Oh and sometimes our mind kindly keeps things hidden from us and there’s nothing wrong with that either. It is generous on the part of the mind to look out for us this way.
First of all, I don’t like Gertrude Stein’s writing. Conceptually what she is doing might be interesting, and I appreciate the fact that she was brave and that she wrote what she wanted to write even if she had to publish it herself, but her writing is awful to read. I was sitting in the train station this morning reading Tender Buttons and a young man was pacing up and down, somewhat agitated, muttering to himself or occasionally talking out loud. His conversation sounded like this: one more time, I’m telling you, cartwheels, yes, last chance, and that’s spelled C-H-A-N-C-E. I thought he sounded an awful lot like Stein.
I think the purpose of language is to say something. Otherwise why don’t we just grunt and groan and make barking noises?
People say that Stein “reacquaints” us with language.
I can do it too (if I may be so audacious). My version of Gertrude Stein’s poem Orange.
Lemon (a poem that was more satisfying to write than to read)
Why is a smell crab an eyebrow run. Why is a round yellow why is a sad color a round round a broken show and give me back my pieces just give me yellow round tart table round canter clop in the heat be okay I just want to be okay be okay I just want the yellow sun.
Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011):
Palestinian poet, author of “So What; New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005″ pub.2006, Copper Canyon Press
Green Diver
Our Sunday poem. This is by my friend, Peter Sears. I think it’s a good one for today. 9/11. The poem is taken from Peter’s book, Green Diver. Cover art by Rick Bartow. Purchase Peter’s book here, and if you are ever lucky enough to get a chance to hear him read, do it.
The Iraqi Women
From an article in “The Oregonian,” 07/05/06, A-5
The parking lot is filling with Iraqi women
here at the Baghdad City Morgue, just like yesterday.
Any minute now, a truck load of the dead is due in,
accompanied by the Americans.
Sunni and Shia slaughter one another and walk away.
The parking lot is filling with Iraqi women.
70 percent of the dead now are civilian.
Even children are common prey.
Any minute now, a truck load of the dead is due in.
The women wait to be told when they may go in.
Yesterday they waited all day.
The parking lot is filling with Iraqi women.
Wood scraps and paper they gather and burn
to drive the odor of death away.
Any minute now, a truck load of the dead is due in.
Here come the trucks! The gates swing open.
The women are told, Stand back, stay out of the way.
The parking lot is filling with Iraqi women.
Any minute now, another truck load of the dead is due in.
The plums are ripe and summer is over. I am back at work. Chuck has made a studio for me, a room in the back yard near the garden, so I have a place to write. I would rather write about my life than live it. That is a terrible thing to admit.
Oh, today is Tuesday already. What happened to Sunday, poetry day on my blog? I am trying to be organized, to give you something you can count on. Here is one of my favorite lines in poetry. It is by Rilke.
from Rilke’s Ellegy #9
Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House,
Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -
possibly: Pillar, Tower?… but for saying, remember,
oh, for such saying as never the things themselves
hoped so intensely to be
In The Art of Fiction David Lodge talks about the refusal of Paul Eluard, then one of the world’s most renowned Communist poets, to intervene on behalf of his friend, Zavis Kalandra, a surrealist who was executed by the new, revolutionary Czech government. Lodge tells about Milan Kundera describing a day in June of 1950 when the ‘streets of Prague were once again ‘crowded with young people dancing….’ The day before, a Socialist politician and a surrealist artist were hanged, ‘as enemies of the state.’”
Lodge quotes Milan Kundra’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
…Prague with its cafes full of poets and its jails full of traitors, and in the crematorium they were just finishing off one Socialist representative and one surrealist, and the smoke climbed to the heavens like a good omen, and I heard Eluard’s metallic voice intoning,
Love is at work it is tireless
Is it pathetic that, aside from two older women at the table next to me (who are talking about poetry), every single person in this coffeehouse is on a laptop? Or are the rest of them, like me, tired of working alone in their houses and simply wishing for some semblance of companionship?
It’s Sunday, poetry day. This is from Sara Backer.
I heard there was a fat skunk, all white,
who waddled in the yard followed by two kits
the men called babies.
I heard about a pair of chipmunks and raccoons
that hung around the kitchen.
A hummingbird appeared one morning,
a gray-tailed hawk at noon,
and at night, feeding on mosquitoes, bats carved
dark curves in the darker sky.
In the concrete room without windows
where we held class, I was impressed the men all knew
each bird and animal the others mentioned.
They could pinpoint their location
in the prison they inhabited.
I was reading about lyric essays. I think my essays are lyric essays and not just because they are disorganized. I only learned the term when I went back to school. People do things and don’t even know those things have names, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we don’t know what we’re doing. I kept coming across the name of a particular lyric essayist and I looked her up. The first thing I saw was a controversy about a poem by Tony Hoagland, which she considered racist. I read that poem. First of all, it was in a collection called What Narcissism Means to Me. Which should give the reader some kind of clue. Second, who is to say that the narrator of a poem is the author? Really! And THIRD the poem seemed to me to be playing with ideas about race, but that doesn’t make it racist. And IF the poem is racist, which it isn’t—it is racist against whites.
I was taught by nuns. I learned to hate the censorship of thought. Give me a government that simply makes laws against expression rather than the insidious self-censor, fearing the wrath of the easily offended. Anyway, regardless, it was a poem that moved you, even if you are not a poet, even if you don’t know poetry but only what you respond to.
Tony Hoagland has a Wikipedia page. And Tony Hoagland is born on my exact birthday. Tony Hoagland grew up in the south on military bases just like me. He picked fruit in the west and so did I. Winters, California, apples. He dropped out of college and hey, me too. Only he went back and is teaching at Warren Wilson and I just now went back, decades later, and wish I could to go to Warren Wilson. Chuck said I should write to Tony Hoagland and tell him this. I said no, but I will blog about it.
Read Tony’s poem and tell me what you think.
