Poetry Month - Rae Armantrout

Unbidden
by Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

•

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

•

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.



~ From the Academy of American Poets

Tags: Academy of American Poets, National Poetry Month, Rae Armantrout, Unbidden, poetry

Puerhan - "Poetry Mala"

Puerhan has been writing 108 poems in 108 days as a form of spiritual practice, an idea that I find incredibly interesting and useful. Go check out his site.

Here are a few samples.

108 Poems #082

A sunny yellow daffodil
Gazing out the window
I forget the morning is grey

108 Poems #081

Glistening cells
And sweet juice
Fibres caught between my teeth

108 Poems #080

Nothing seems certain
Least of all the movements of the heart
Undermined by a stomach full of doubt

Tags: Puerhan, poetry mala, 108 poems, poetry

Poetry Month - Jack Gilbert

Summer at Blue Creek, North Carolina
by Jack Gilbert

There was no water at my grandfather's
when I was a kid and would go for it
with two zinc buckets. Down the path,
past the cow by the foundation where
the fine people's house was before
they arranged to have it burned down.
To the neighbor's cool well. Would
come back with pails too heavy,
so my mouth pulled out of shape.
I see myself, but from the outside.
I keep trying to feel who I was,
and cannot. Hear clearly the sound
the bucket made hitting the sides
of the stone well going down,
but never the sound of me.


~ Academy of American Poets

Tags: National Poetry Month, poetry, Academy of American Poets, Summer at Blue Creek North Carolina, Jack Gilbert

Celeste Thompson - Write a poem a day for National Poetry Month

Celeste Thompson at Ardent Shanty has accepted a challenge to write a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

April is national poetry month. I've committed to writing a poem every day this month, and I'll post the results of that goal on here.

When I decided to do this, I brainstormed some topics to write about. The immediate themes that came to mind were birds, music, sex, food, and fish. Hmmm. Those are things I always write about, so it's apparent that I need to think outside the box for some fresh ideas.

This is her first effort:

Describing Nokkelost* to Disarmingly Handsome and Unfailingly Polite Mr. C

Nutty, creamy, and spicy. Intensifies with age.
Supple. Elastic. Smooth.
Fragrant clove buds hide inside these pale, creamy walls.
Slight saltiness lingers on the lips.
Semihard. Aged. Generous fat content.

Sometimes smells like rye.



*Nokkelost is a Norwegian cheese, banned in the US over mad cow disease fears.

Seems like a great challenge - if anyone else decides to join in, please send me a link to your blog. I might even join in over at Integral Options Cafe.

Tags: National Poetry Month, Celeste Thompson, Ardent Shanty, poetry

FSG Poetry Announces a Poem-a-Day

Nice Poetry Month promotion from FSG, one of the best supporters of poetry among the major publishers.

FSG Poetry Announces a Poem-a-Day

We're always evolving here at the FSG poetry blog, trying to bring you better and better National Poetry Month content.

This year, we've started a new promotion, one poem daily delivered directly to your inbox. Our poets have selected the verses themselves, so you'll be receiving daily selections from the likes of Louise Gluck, Frederick Seidel, Charles Wright, and tons more.

To sign up, just click here, or fill out the information in the sidebar to the right.

Tags: National Poetry Month, poetry, FSG

April Is National Poetry Month

And here is this year's poster:

Tags: poetry, announcements, National Poetry Month, Academy of American Poets

TED Talks - C.K. Williams: Poetry for all seasons of life

A great talk from a few years back at the TED Conference.

Poet C.K. Williams reads his work at TED 2001. As he colors scenes of childhood resentments, college loves, odd neighbors and the literal death of youth, he reminds us of the unique challenges of living.

Williams started writing poetry at 19, after taking only his required English classes at University of Pennsylvania. In the 1960s, he began gearing his poems toward social issues, such as the brutality that civil rights activists often faced and his anti-war stance with respect to Vietnam. Over time, although he continued to write about society, his work became more personal. His focus shifted to the intersection of profoundly different lives in crowded urban spaces, using these instances to examine sensitive issues such as race and class.

The subject matter of his work is not its only controversy, and Williams is often compared to Whitman and Ginsberg because of his unusually long lines of verse. Despite his unconventional poetic form, he has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among other honors. He has also published five works of translation and a psychologically introspective memoir, Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself.

Tags: poetry, TED talks, C.K. Williams, Poetry for all seasons of life

New Spring Poetry Books

The Academy of American Poets has assembled a list of the new poetry books this spring, with info and a sample poem for most if not all of them. Damned awesome of them, especially as National Poetry Month is right around the corner.

Below is a list of new poetry titles that will be published in spring 2008 by the sponsors of National Poetry Month. Browse the list by poet, title, or press. Click on a title to get more information and a sample poem. Support your local bookseller by searching for poetry-friendly bookstores by State at the National Poetry Map, or buy the book online at Amazon.com.

Here are a few favorite poets of mine with new books:

Face
Hanging Loose Press
by Sherman Alexie

Versed
Wesleyan University Press
by Rae Armantrout

See Jack
University of Pittsburgh Press
by Russell Edson

The Dance Most of All
Alfred K. Knopf
by Jack Gilbert

The Winter Sun
Graywolf Press
by Fanny Howe

Or to Begin Again
Penguin
by Ann Lauterbach

Sestets
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
by Charles Wright

There are dozens more at the site.

Tags: poetry, new books, National Poetry Month, The Academy of American Poets

Fanny Howe - Buddhists Like School and I Don’t

Poet Fanny Howe meditates on on the intersections of language, writing, and God in this excellent article from The Poetry Foundation. This is one of my favorite forms of non-fiction - the essay as art.

“Buddhists Like School and I Don’t.”

by Fanny Howe

God is unevolved and therefore cannot be apprehended by the senses, and as such exists as the witness of what is and also as light and energy, neither of which can be touched except by touching itself.

You put your hand to your cheek and touch your own light and your own energy.

You can call light and energy by the name of God if you want.

If you don’t want to say God, you must expect this choice to help make you lose your bearings until you understand how it moves around, shifting its position from being in you and of you, to being far from you.

Divinity—Trinity—What’s the difference?

No difference? No difference, no words. No word for difference, no identity. The genealogical and psychological search for an identity hitherto unnoticed, unknown, leads nowhere. The world is the unconscious but nature is not symbolic.

The quest for a condition that exists in two separate states is what confuses people. The person looking for “me” (a fixed identity) is also the same person looking for (a vapory word) “God.” This split search can only be folded into one in the process of working on something—whether it is writing, digging, planting, painting, teaching—with a wholeheartedness that qualifies as complete attention. In such a state, you find yourself depending on chance or grace to supply you with the focus to complete what you are doing. Your work is practical, but your relationship to it is illogical in the range of its possible errors and failures. You align yourself with something behind and ahead and above you that is geometric in nature; you lean on its assistance, realizing the inadequacy of your words.

Simone Weil said in “Human Personality”:

At the very best, a mind enclosed in language is in prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. . . . The intelligent man who is proud of his intelligence is like a condemned man who is proud of his large cell.

Yes, the problem of vocabulary in these matters is obvious, because a solution to the problem is made of the words. Who doesn’t know that? If a bird has a problem with its whistle, it has to whistle to fix it.

All voices tend toward song, and the vibrations of music in the vocal cords deeply influence the way spoken words are heard.

Franz Rosenzweig noted:

In actual conversation, something happens. I do not know in advance what the other will say to me because I myself do not even know what I am going to say; perhaps not even whether I am going to say anything at all. . . . To need time means being able to anticipate nothing, having to wait for everything, being dependent on the other for one’s own.

I understand that what is heard is what is already in the past and the proof for that is measurable. Sound has to travel a little way; it has to overcome space in order to reach a pair of ears. In this space of time, a few distortions can occur. Anxiety, misunderstanding can intervene, even heartbreak. Indeed, words themselves can, if allowed, seem to lose their original intention on their way out of the mouth.

Socrates believed that the soul is eternal and contains knowledge of all things. In the trauma of birth, the soul loses its memory and has to start all over again. But in the experience of living and learning, it finds its way back to the truths that it lost.

* * *

Revision is the path taken by an autodidact like me. In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.

Right until he committed suicide in the end, Socrates had the high spirits of someone who knew (as in recognized) himself (his own condition).

One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it. The errors, the hits and misses, the excess—erase them all.

Now read what you have rewritten out loud in front of some other people. They will hear something that you didn’t say aloud. They will hear what was there before you began revising and even before the words were written down. You won’t hear anything but the humming of your own vocal cords.

It’s the same as what Remy de Gourmont in his “Dust for Sparrows” wrote from the point of view of the listener:

Never have literary works seemed so beautiful to me as when at a theatre or in reading, because of lack of habit or lacking a complete knowledge of the language, I lost the meaning of many phrases. This threw about them a light veil of somewhat silvery shadow, making the poetry more purely musical, more ethereal.

Even while I have gone back over the words, I have never been sure of the need for it, the use of writing at all, the value of any completed poem, or the idea that writing might lead somewhere. I haven’t really known what I was doing, only that I would keep on doing it. It is a form of promiscuity and wanderlust. I could just as well have been a barmaid or a mailman. I could just as well throw all these papers in a river before sniffing some helium and letting go, because it was in the end only a part of the natural world.

Go read the rest of the article, which originally appeared in Poetry, March 2009.

Tags: Fanny Howe, Buddhists Like School and I Don’t, essays, poetry, Poetry Foundation, language, writing, God, meditation

Allen Ginsberg - Mind Writng Slogans

[image source]

These are great writing slogans from Allen Ginsberg, based on the Buddhist Lojong slogans that seek to focus the mind outside of its normal conceptions.

They contain both Absolute Bodhicitta suggestions to expand one's viewpoint, such as Find the consciousness you had before you were born and Treat everything you perceive as a dream, and Relative Bodhicitta suggestions for relating to the world in a more constructive way, such as Be grateful to everyone or When everything goes wrong, treat disaster as a way to wake up.

A lot of the quotes come from Buddhist teachers, both well-known (Chogyam Trungpa) and lesser known (Gelek Rinpoche), as well as fellow poets and artists.

I found these at Moonchild.

ALLEN GINSBERG

MIND WRITING SLOGANS

"First Thought is Best in Art, Second in Other Matters."
— William Blake

I Background (Situation, Or Primary Perception)

1. "First Thought, Best Thought" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
2. "Take a friendly attitude toward your thoughts." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
3. "The Mind must be loose." — John Adams
4. "One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception." — Charles Olson, "Projective Verse"
5. "My writing is a picture of the mind moving." — Philip Whalen
6. Surprise Mind — Allen Ginsberg
7. "The old pond, a frog jumps in, Kerplunk!" — Basho
8. "Magic is the total delight (appreciation) of chance." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
9. "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes." –– Walt Whitman
10. "...What quality went to form a man of achievement, especially in literature? ... Negative capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." — John Keats
11. "Form is never more than an extension ofcontent. — Robert Creeley to Charles Olson
12. "Form follows function." — Frank Lloyd Wright*
13. Ordinary Mind includes eternal perceptions. — A. G.
14. "Nothing is better for being Eternal

Nor so white as the white that dies of a day." — Louis Zukofsky
15. Notice what you notice. — A. G.
16. Catch yourself thinking. — A. G.
17. Observe what’s vivid. — A. G.
18. Vividness is self-selecting. — A. G.
19. "Spots of Time" — William Wordsworth
20. If we don’t show anyone we’re free to write anything. –– A. G.
21. "My mind is open to itself." — Gelek Rinpoche
22. "Each on his bed spoke to himself alone, making no sound." — Charles Reznikoff

II Path (Method, Or Recognition)

23. "No ideas but in things." "... No ideas but in the Facts." — William Carlos Williams
24. "Close to the nose." — W. C. Williams
25. "Sight is where the eye hits." — Louis Zukofsky
26. "Clamp the mind down on objects." — W C. Williams
27. "Direct treatment of the thing ... (or object)." — Ezra Pound, 1912
28. "Presentation, not reference." — Ezra Pound
29. "Give me a for instance." — Vernacular
30. "Show not tell." — Vernacular
31. "The natural object is always the adequate symbol." — Ezra Pound
32. "Things are symbols of themselves." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
33. "Labor well the minute particulars, take care of the little ones.

He who would do good for another must do it in minute particulars.
General Good is the plea of the Scoundrel Hypocrite and Flatterer
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars." — William Blake
34. "And being old she put a skin / on everything she said." — W. B. Yeats
35. "Don’t think of words when you stop but to see the picture better." — Jack Kerouac
36. "Details are the Life of Prose." — Jack Kerouac
37. Intense fragments of spoken idiom best. — A. G.
38. "Economy of Words" — Ezra Pound
39. "Tailoring" — Gregory Corso
40. Maximum information, minimum number of syllables. –– A. G.
41. Syntax condensed, sound is solid. — A. G.
42. Savor vowels, appreciate consonants. — A. G.
43. "Compose in the sequence of musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome." — Ezra Pound
44. "... awareness ... of the tone leading of the vowels." — Ezra Pound
45. "... an attempt to approximate classical quantitative meters . . . — Ezra Pound
46. "Lower limit speech, upper limit song" — Louis Zukofsky
47. "Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia." — Ezra Pound
48. "Sight. Sound & Intellect." — Louis Zukofsky
49. "Only emotion objectified endures." — Louis Zukofsky

III Fruition (Result, Or Appreciation)

50. Spiritus = Breathing = Inspiration = Unobstructed Breath
51. "Alone with the Alone" — Plotinus
52. Sunyata (Sanskrit) = Ku (Japanese) = Emptiness
53. "What’s the sound of one hand clapping?" — Zen Koan
54. "What’s the face you had before you were born?" — Zen Koan
55. Vipassana (Pali) = Clear Seeing
56. "Stop the world" — Carlos Castafleda
57. "The purpose of art is to stop time." — Bob Dylan
58. "the unspeakable visions of the individual — J. K.
59. "I am going to try speaking some reckless words, and I want you to try to listen recklessly." — Chuang Tzu (Tr. Burton Watson)
60. "Candor" —Whitman
61. "One touch of nature makes the whole world kin." — W. Shakespeare
62. "Contact" — A Magazine, Nathaniel West & W. C. Williams, Eds.
63. "God appears & God is Light

To those poor souls who dwell in Night.
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day." — W. Blake
64. "Subject is known by what she sees." -A. G.
65. Others can measure their visions by what we see. –– A. G.
66. Candor ends paranoia. — A. G.
67. "Willingness to be Fool." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
68. "Day & Night / you’re all right." — Gregory Corso
69. Tyger: "Humility is Beatness." — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche & A. G.
70. Lion: "Surprise Mind" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche &A.G.
71. Garuda: "Crazy Wisdom Outrageousness" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
72. Dragon: "Unborn Inscrutability" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
73. "To be men not destroyers" — Ezra Pound
74. Speech synchronizes mind & body — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
75. "The Emperor unites Heaven & Earth" — Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche
76. "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" — Shelley
77. "Make it new" — Ezra Pound
78. "When the music changes, the walls of the city shake" — Plato
79. "Every third thought shall be my grave — W Shakespeare, The Tempest
80. "That in black ink my love may still shine bright." –– W. Shakespeare, Sonnets
81. "Only emotion endures" — Ezra Pound
82. "Well while I’m here I’ll

do the work —
and what’s the Work?
To ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow." — A. G.
83. "... Kindness, sweetest of the small notes in the world’s ache, most modest & gentle of the elements entered man before history and became his daily connection, let no man tell you otherwise." — Carl Rakosi
84. "To diminish the mass of human and sentient sufferings." — Gelek Rinpoche

Naropa Institute, July 1992
New York, March 5, 1993
New York, June 27, 1993

* Quoting his mentor; Louis Sullivan.

Allen Ginsberg "Mind Writing Slogans" copyright © 1992, 1993 by Allen Ginsberg, in What Book: Buddha Poems From Beat To Hiphop, Gary Gach, ed., copyright © 1998 by Gary Gach. Parallax Press.

Tags: Allen Ginsberg, poetry, writing, Mind Writing Slogans, lojong, Buddhism, Moonchild, What Book, Buddha Poems From Beat To Hiphop