Category Archives: poetry

going down by the bow

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It’s an old seafaring term, meaning a ship sinking front end first. I just thought of it and laughed, remembering that it came to me as I sat listening to poets at last Summer’s SB Book and Author Festival. Most of them were great, but one poet was obviously – to me – uncomfortable with being on stage, at a microphone, in front of a group of people. I watched and listened and thought, “That poor woman is going down by the bow.” It struck me funny then too, and I’m only glad I didn’t blurt it out.

(You know that little switch in your head, that keeps you from yawping out thoughts best kept private? Do you think it can really be trusted? I’m never completely sure.)

Reading in public isn’t easy. We poets tend to be solitary when it comes to spelunking the caverns of our creative underworld. So to take one’s little offerings from the printer, carry them to a lecture hall or coffee house, and offer them up is an art or artifice in itself.

I consider myself well practiced in it, but I’ve taken on water and sailed off listing to starboard a few times myself.

All of which is prefatory to sending you off to mystic-lit, to read poet Joseph Gallo’s thoughts on readings. And you can read three of his fine poems too. … Aloud, if you please, if only to the cat or the living room wall. It’s all good practice.

and miles to go for a cup of joe

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Here’s a recipe which serves me well on nights like this, which happens to be the longest night of the year.

Uncle Kyle’s Solstice Decaf Mocha, ala Cheapo.

First you make a small pot of decaf coffee.
Pour some coffee into a favorite Christmas coffee mug (example pictured).
Add 1 packet sweetener (optional).
Add 1 small squirt coffee creamer, preferably fat free (optional).
From the cupboard, produce one packet instant hot chocolate mix, preferably sugar free.
Add about a third to a half packet of the chocolate mix.
Note: If you’ve wandered off into impending Winter without some of this stuff, Heaven help you. And don’t use the whole packet; you’re making mocha, not pudding. Besides even the low cal stuff is 60 calories a pop.
Stir languidly but with pensive sincerity, while staring out the kitchen window at your Christmas lights – or at the back-splash, doesn’t matter – until bored.
Serve hot and sip while blogging insipidly into the abyss.


(click to enlarge)

Shot with my phone, so not a great picture. But yep, the flier in the background really says “Join Us for a Holiday Party at the Pool !!!” That’s from the homeowners association. Took place last Friday: Christmas party, outdoors, by the pool. At night. Kids watched Rudolph and his nose struggle against the vice grip of prejudice on our portable giant screen system. Don’t you wish you lived here? I do.

Anyway, there’s a pretty amazing moon out there, so it’s not the darkest evening. But while you’re enjoying a steaming mug of Uncle Kyle’s Solstice Mocha ala Cheapo, here’s a poem for the longest evening of the year.

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
– Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

to seek a poetic body?

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“The roots of poetry are buried in proto-shamanism, which I suspect is of Upper Paleolithic antiquity. The shaman, as a novice, must rid himself of his given body, for a new and magical body, which is capable of mental travel. The main difference here between shamans, say, in 19th century Siberia, and poets in America today, is that shamans were central to their communities, they belonged in a way no American writer, even those with huge audiences, belong today. Whatever one must do to make the move from the given life to a creative one — well, that is up to each of us. The poetry scene today is flooded with young, talented, unoriginal writers who are trying to write significant poetry based on their given lives…”

From an Interview of Clayton Eshleman in Seattle Review, via Poetry Daily.

As a poet, I have been accused of OBE, by turns defined as out of body experience and overcome by events. Several people have said they don’t understand how a poet goes to the places where a poet goes; how we manage to attribute states of Being to situations, settings and states of mind that transcend their ordinary definition. I tend to think that transcendent reality is inherent in those things; it just takes someone willing to look at them sideways or through a refracted light to bring them out. And willing to transcribe the music that results.

As for the task of the poet to move from given life to a creative one, I think that’s only possible moment to moment. The spirit of the full time shaman is stone cold dead in the Western world; killed off, probably, by the television. Do you disagree?

Howl kept well chilled by Feds

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Fifty years ago today, a San Francisco Municipal Court judge ruled that Allen Ginsberg’s Beat-era poem “Howl” was not obscene. Yet today, a New York public broadcasting station decided not to air the poem, fearing that the Federal Communications Commission will find it indecent and crush the network with crippling fines.

Free-speech advocates see tremendous irony in how Ginsberg’s epic poem – which lambastes the consumerism and conformism of the 1950s and heralds a budding American counterculture – is, half a century later, chilled by a federal government crackdown on the broadcasting of provocative language.

San Francisco Chronicle

I am not afraid. But I’m not going to post the whole thing. It’s long. Somebody may have renewed the copyright. So here’s a little, and you can Google the poem to read it all. It’s a great piece of work.

Unfortunately, Blogger can’t publish the line breaks and indents as Ginsberg intended.

HOWL

For Carl Solomon

I

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat
up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz,
who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and
saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tene-
ment roofs illuminated,
who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes
hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy
among the scholars of war,
who were expelled from the academies for crazy &
publishing obscene odes on the windows of the
skull,
who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burn-
ing their money in wastebaskets and listening
to the Terror through the wall,
who got busted in their pubic beards returning through
Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York,
who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in
Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their
torsos night after night …

my heart

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I subscribe to the daily e-mail from Dr. Weil. Today’s message reads, in part:

Are You Eating For Your Heart?

Changing your diet can be an effective, gentle, inexpensive – and even delicious – way to prevent, relieve or even reverse a wide variety of conditions. If you are at risk or have been diagnosed with heart disease, reduce your intake of saturated and trans fats.
Simple dietary changes

Which brought to mind these lines from Stephen Crane:

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, beastial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter,- bitter”, he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart”.

an inverse love poem

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My friend and fellow poet Joseph Gallo has published a fine poem, I Cut Myself, at theharrow.com, an online literary journal. He is an excellent and insightful poet, with a vocabulary like the view from the top of a hill. His blogs, Drachenthrax and Yarblehead, are in the blogroll. Good work, Joseph!