Category Archives: poetry

What Must Be Returned

Posted on by
So yesterday I went to a reading by my friend Joseph Gallo, who read his fine poems and played his contemplative cedar flute for us. It was a beautiful day in Santa Barbara, in which the spring sunlight was lying passive as a cat. Joseph’s material and presentation were compassionate and generous. So I declare it was an excellent reason to emerge from my lair.


I enjoyed all of Joseph’s poems and some really jumped out at me. So much so that I had to fumble in my pockets for a pen and paper and scribble a note.


One poem that struck me is called Summer Sends You Sun, and you can read it on his blog.


…I will never see

the tender suffering at your window for I will have returned

my eyes to the stars. I shall instead lay my light upon the hand
of your youthful skin as the night visits in its way.


Thanks, Joseph! 

Quote of the Day

Posted on by

"Memory is required for poetry, but memory of a very specific kind. Not the dimestore memories of reproducing what once happened to you, but rather syntactical memories, gathering the emotional weight of the poem as it accrues from line to line. Poetry is associative, not dissociative: it proceeds neither by fact, nor chronological sequence, nor strictly reasoned argument. It follows the inexorable logic of the way we think and feel and what we notice (which is where the poem’s camera focuses)."

— Ira Sadoff, Poetic Memory, Poetic Design

via Poetry Daily – News

Defining Fire

Posted on by

I am sitting here in my home office, drinking coffee and watching my fireplace DVD. It’s nice on a rainy day, relaxing; a nice ambiance, without being distracting.

I’m thinking about fire. It’s one of the elemental facets of our world, and we know what it is, but how would you define it? In school we learned that it’s a chemical reaction, but …well, you know me, I had to look it up.

Fire – n. 1. a. A rapid, persistent chemical change that releases heat and light and is accompanied by flame, especially the exothermic oxidation of a combustible substance. b. Burning fuel or other material: a cooking fire; a forest fire.

Of course, there are many other definitions, but that’s not my point.

Being writers and poets, it is important that we know and ponder the meanings of words. Having a conversational familiarity is not enough. Because using words normally isn’t always art. Sometimes we use words almost just a little bit wrong, which is to say creatively. To be a moment misunderstood, understood almost too late.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.
– Robert Francis

So I ask you, my artistic friend, what’s your persistent chemical change today? I know where mine is, and it’s not out there in the cold wind and rain, yet out I go. I hope for you the banking of a brazen pagan fire for the solstice between your ears, with a sparkling euphony of tintinnabulous bells.

Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

– Poe

time flees

Posted on by

In today’s Writer’s Almanac, we learn about the poet May Swenson, who said that poetry is, "based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness."

My first thought on hearing this (I get the podcast via iTunes) was oh, that’s going on the blog. Which immediately points out a recurring problem for me with the art and artifice of blogging; to wit, its capabilities for instant publishing. Whenever I think about blogging on a topic, I get in a hurry. Must type quickly and click Publish, before the furiously-spinning earth turns too much farther into the night.

The arrow of time has been launched, and we are flinging ourselves through space in pursuit of it. The concept that the sooner I type something up, the sooner I can instantly publish it, just makes that pursuit more frenetic.

Incidentally, the Latin phrase tempis fugit means time flees, not time flies, and not time is of the essence, though I suppose it’s all the same.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams

So I am going for a walk, to step away from my cyclopean friend here and think about the possibly brilliant thing poet May Swenson said about poetry. Then I’ll decide if there is some annotation or explication I would like to contribute to it. In the mean time, I’m going to instantly publish this, to let you all know that process is taking place:

A bit of psychic Top Kill, if you will.

Ha! I got you. You thought I was going to forego instant publishing for a few minutes, did you? I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. It’s 2010, we are fleeing through space. And in space, no one can hear you think.

hal2

Futility

Posted on by

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil  
To break earth's sleep at all?

by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Welcome to National Poetry Month. This poem arrived in my inbox today, and I concur it's quite right to begin the month with it. There is so much packed into its 14 lines.

Wilfred Owen died in WWI, aged about 25. And it begs the question, do they still make soldier-poets, and send them off to war? Or does war make poets of them? Do they carry futility with them, or merely bring it home?

You can decide.

following the black dog

Posted on by

It is not often as a reader of poetry that I encounter a poem built entirely of pure metaphor; where all pretext and embellishment have been gently sanded away. Here is such a poem, By Dark by W.S. Merwin.

When it is time I follow the black dog
into the darkness that is the mind of day

I tell you, settling into words like those is like taking hold of a banister worn smooth by countless hands. There is no question, we are going up. And he has my full attention and emotional investment in the first dyad.

When it is time for what, other than the following?

Where is the darkness? And why – how – is it the mind of day?

I’ll leave it to you, following your own black dog. Or maybe you’ll chose a blue one.