Elegant Thorn Review

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Poetry Month - James Merrill

A Selected Poems of James Merrill (1926-1995) is now available in
paperback, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser. As ever, his
range astounds, and the poem below, from 1985, reminds us how timeless
and timely his work is.

******************************

Page from the Koran

A small vellum environment
Overrun by black
Scorpions of Kufic script—their ranks
All trigger tail and gold vowel-sac—
At auction this mild winter morning went
For six hundred Swiss francs.

By noon, fire from the same blue heavens
Had half erased Beirut.
Allah be praised, it said on crude handbills,
For guns and Nazarenes to shoot.
"How gladly with proper words," said Wallace Stevens,
"The soldier dies." Or kills.

God's very word, then, stung the heart
To greed and rancor. Yet
Not where the last glow touches one spare man
Inked-in against his minaret
—Letters so handled they are life, and hurt,
Leaving the scribe immune?

~ From Knopf Poetry

Friday, April 10, 2009

Poetry Month - Wayne Miller

Nocturne
by Wayne Miller

Tonight all the leaves are paper spoons
in a broth of wind. Last week
they made a darker sky below the sky.

The houses have swallowed their colors,
and each car moves in the blind sack
of its sound like the slipping of water.

Flowing means falling very slowly—
the river passing under the tracks,
the tracks then buried beneath the road.

When a knocking came in the night,
I rose violently toward my reflection
hovering beneath this world. And then

the fluorescent kitchen in the window
like a page I was reading—a face
coming into focus behind it:

my neighbor locked out of his own party,
looking for a phone. I gave him
a beer and the lit pad of numbers

through which he disappeared; I found
I was alone with the voices that bloomed
as he opened the door. It's time

to slip my body beneath the covers,
let it fall down the increments of shale,
let the wind consume every spoon.

My voice unhinging itself from light,
my voice landing in its cradle—.
How terrifying a payphone is

hanging at the end of its cord.
Which is not to be confused with sleep—
sleep gives the body back its mouth.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Thursday, April 9, 2009

Poetry Month - Mei-Yao Ch'en

An Excuse For Not Returning the Visit of a Friend
by Mei-Yao Ch'en
translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Do not be offended because
I am slow to go out. You know
Me too well for that. On my lap
I hold my little girl. At my
Knees stands my handsome little son.
One has just begun to talk.
The other chatters without
Stopping. They hang on my clothes
And follow my every step.
I can't get any farther
Than the door. I am afraid
I will never make it to your house.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Shambhala Sun - The Vomit of a Mad Tyger: The Spiritual Autobiography of Allen Ginsberg

I loved this article when I read in the magazine, and I think any Ginsberg fan will love it as well. The piece really looks at his Buddhist practice, but it's not really possible to separate that from his poetry. So this article becomes a look at the spiritual poetics of Ginsberg, one of our greatest poets.

The Vomit of a Mad Tyger
The Spiritual Autobiography of Allen Ginsberg
By Allen Ginsberg
The Shambhala Sun presents this exclusive auto-biographical account from the late poet and cultural icon Allen Ginsberg, narrating his spiritual journey from Blake to the Buddha.

We’ll begin at the beginning, because what I’d like to do is trace what spiritual inklings I had that led to interest in Tibetan Buddhism and guru relationship.

I was in love with a high school fellow who went off to Columbia College when he graduated a half-term before me in Central High School in Patterson, New Jersey. So I decided to go to Columbia College instead of Montclair State Teachers College, where all of my family had gone. Out of some kind of devotion I broke away from the traditional pattern of my family but I didn’t have money, so I had to take a scholarship entrance exam. On the ferry between Hoboken and New York I got down on my knees and made a vow that if I were admitted to Columbia, I would do everything I could to save mankind. It was a naive bodhisattva’s vow out of fear of not getting into Columbia.

Around the time I got into school, I ran into William Burroughs and Lucian Carr and Jack Kerouac. We became friends. Our conversation between 1945 and 1948 was recollections of our own childhood inklings, including the big question, “How big was the universe?” I think Kerouac and I had a sense of panoramic awareness of the vastness of space. So the question, how big was the “unborn,” arose. Or, how vast was the space we were in, and what was the mystery of the universe?

That led to a lot of conversations and inquiries with marijuana and wandering around the city considering the look of the buildings and the appearance of the facades of Times Square, particularly. Times Square seen as a stage set with a facade that could vanish at any second. That impression of the apparent material of the universe as “real,” but at the same time “unreal” in some way or other, either because we were high, or because time would dissolve the “seen,” or maybe some trick of the eyeball reveals the “facade” as empty.

So we began talking about what in 1945 we called a New Consciousness, or a New Vision. As most young people probably do, at the age of fifteen to nineteen, whether it’s punk or bohemia or grunge or whatever new vision adolescents have, there is always some kind of striving for understanding and transformation of the universe, according to one’s own subjective, poetic, generational inspiration.

That led to an exploration of the otherwise rejected world of junkies around Times Square and the underworld. The world of drugs—which had a slight effect in transforming consciousness or altering moods and was presumed to be a kind of artistic specimen trial—I found quite harmless and useful as an educational experience, though some of my contemporaries did get hung up, like Burroughs—although the main problem seemed to be alcohol more than any other.

In 1948 I Had some kind of break in the normal modality of my consciousness. While alone living a relatively solitary vegetarian contemplative life, reading St. John of the Cross, Plotinus some, notions of “alone with the Alone,” or “one hand clapping,” or The Cloud of Unknowing, or Plato’s Phaedrus, and William Blake, I had what was, for me, an extraordinary break in the normal nature of my thought when something opened up.

I had finished masturbating, actually, on the sixth floor of a Harlem tenement on 121st Street looking out at the roofs while reading Blake, back and forth, and suddenly had a kind of auditory hallucination, hearing Blake—what I thought was his voice, a very deep, earthen tone, not very far from my own mature tone of voice, so perhaps a projection of my own latent physiology—reciting a poem called “Sunflower,” which I thought expressed some kind of universal longing for union with some infinite nature. The poem goes:

Ah, Sun-flower, weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun,
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the traveller’s journey is done:
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded within snow
Arise from their graves, and aspire
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

I can’t interpret it exactly now, but the impression that I had at the time was of some infinite yearning for the infinite, finally realized, and I looked out the window and began to notice the extraordinary detail of intelligent labor that had gone into the making of the rooftop cornices of the Harlem buildings. I suddenly realized that the world was, in a sense, not dead matter but an increment or deposit of living intelligence and action and activity that finally took form—the Italian laborers of 1890 and 1910, making very fine copper work and roofcomb ornament as you find along the older tenement apartment buildings.

As I looked at the sky, I wondered what kind of intelligence had made that vastness, or what was the nature of the intelligence that I was glimpsing, and felt a sense of vastness and of coming home to space I hadn’t realized was there before but which seemed old and infinite, like the Ancient of Days, so to speak. But I had no training in anything but Western notions and didn’t know how to find a vocabulary for the experience. So I thought I had seen “God” or “Light” or some Western notion of a theistic center, or that was the impression at the time.

That got me into lots of trouble, because I tried to explain it to people and nobody could figure out what I was saying. They thought I was nuts, and in a way, I was. Having no background and no preparation, I didn’t know how to ground the experience in any way that either could prolong it or put it in its place, and certainly didn’t know any teachers whom I could have consulted at Columbia University at the time, although D.T. Suzuki was there.

My first experience with Blake was quite heavenly, but the second experience, about a week later, was just the opposite. At the Columbia bookstore looking around and thinking about this and that, suddenly a sense of sea change of my consciousness overtook me again, and I got scared because everyone in the bookstore looked like some sort of wounded, neurotic, pained animal with the “marks of weakness and marks of woe” on their faces that Blake speaks of in “London.”

A night later, wandering around the Columbia campus, it happened again with a poem called “The Sick Rose,” which goes:

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

And I had a sense of the black sky coming down to eat me.

Go read the whole article.

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Poetry Month - Pamela Spiro Wagner

How to Read a Poem: Beginner's Manual
by Pamela Spiro Wagner

First, forget everything you have learned,
that poetry is difficult,
that it cannot be appreciated by the likes of you,
with your high school equivalency diploma,
your steel-tipped boots,
or your white-collar misunderstandings.

Do not assume meanings hidden from you:
the best poems mean what they say and say it.

To read poetry requires only courage
enough to leap from the edge
and trust.

Treat a poem like dirt,
humus rich and heavy from the garden.
Later it will become the fat tomatoes
and golden squash piled high upon your kitchen table.

Poetry demands surrender,
language saying what is true,
doing holy things to the ordinary.

Read just one poem a day.
Someday a book of poems may open in your hands
like a daffodil offering its cup
to the sun.

When you can name five poets
without including Bob Dylan,
when you exceed your quota
and don't even notice,
close this manual.

~ From the Academy of American Poets

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Bill Hotchkiss - Season Turn

Season Turn

At the end of two weeks of storm,
With snow and bright gusting wind—
Then the most astonishing rainpour,
Roadside ditches spill out onto pavement,
Lane lines disappear in a sheen of runoff—,
Then lightning to the north, strike
After strike, blazing the bellies
Of clouds that wink in silver orgasm.

I drive down from the college on the hill,
Note a few cars nosed into roadside brush,
I test my own brakes, I grasp at the wheel:
Avoid the Cedar Ridge road, go a longer way,
Stay lower and hope no sudden snowfall
Will obscure my vision completely.

But the rain stops, handfuls of stars
Where the clouds shatter, grow thin
And within an hour seem a stream
Heavenwide of mist fragments beaten
Eastward on the High Sierra, a half moon
Sows light on the wet oaks and pines.

Where Casa Loma turns off Rattlesnake,
I pull over, cross pavement on foot, intent
Upon gathering mail. I meet the three
Of them, veering from me but unhurried,
A doe great with life, and two yearlings,
Still following mother, they sidle
Away, steam rising from their backs,
Hooves slipping on slick asphalt,
Bound forward then, though nothing’s
Alarmed them, and tails twitching
They disappear under moon-spattered
Manzanita, the leaves pulsingly wet
This darkness of halfmoon and clouds.

At the end of the storm we have meeting—
Though our paths do not cross, but merely
Draw near, and that chance recognition
In the eyes of three deer and a human.

~ Bill Hotckiss teaches at Sierra College in Grass Valley, CA. He has published many volumes of poetry, many novels, and has written some primary criticism on the poets Robinson Jeffers and William Everson. And he is my friend.

Poetry Month - Jill Bialosky

Jill Bialosky's Intruder is a volume which stretches our understanding of the creative process and the mind behind it, as in "Touch-Me-Nots," given below.

Click here to download a printable broadside of this poem.

Touch-Me-Nots

She brought a little of the country into the city
in the pots of impatiens she had planted.
The petals white, pure, the opposite of color.
She had transferred the impatiens from the garden,
digging her hands into soil two parts fibrous loam,
one part leaf mold and peat moss and pushing
the roots into the earth. Despite the quality
of the soil—its rich decomposition of life—
still they would not last. The plants were hardy
and tender, with thick stems and dark green leaves,
the seedpods inside waiting to release, the air
awash in pollen. She looked into the flower
as into a pair of beckoning eyes offering
sustenance independent of a body, free floating
and regenerative and wholly belonging
to what was impossible ever to touch.

~From Knopf Poetry

Monday, April 6, 2009

Poetry Month - Du Fu

Poem A Day: Du Fu's "Summer Outing"

As David Young reminds us in the introduction to Du Fu: A Life in Poems, the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) produced many outstanding poets, but Du Fu's highly personal voice—his responsiveness to the natural world and to the often chaotic political situation around him, his candid approach to the shifting fortunes of his own family—makes him an especially significant poet for modern readers. Young's crisp and natural translations of Du Fu's poems, grouped into chronological sections with useful paragraph introductions about where Du Fu is and what he is doing in a given period, gives us fresh and full access to Du Fu’s inventive spirit. "His response to the world," Young writes, "to the vicissitudes of history and the grandeurs of landscape, exceeds our capacity to generalize. At the same time, he is willing to incorporate homely details—chasing chickens around his yard, listening to the chirp of a cricket, receiving a gift of shallots from a neighbor—that many poets would find too trivial to mention. The result is a significant expansion of what a poem can include...We can say that Du Fu is the poet who truly originated the lyric poem as we presently know and value it."

The poem below comes from a period (745-750) during which Du Fu, "too young to take up the hermit's life and too ambitious to be bohemian in the way [his contemporary, the poet] Li Bai was," returned to the capital city of Chang'an where he had previously failed the Imperial examination that would allow him a government post. As Young reports, he was frustrated in his efforts again, and hung around the capital, casting about for patronage and writing poems, gradually gaining in strength and skill as a poet.

Click here to download a printable broadside of this poem.

A Summer Outing

1

How nice to board the barge
as the sun meets the horizon

the breeze picks up
the water ripples

we sail past groves
of thick bamboo

and anchor in the cool
of water lilies

the young men mix
some icy drinks

the girls are slicing
lotus roots

but the clouds right overhead
grow black

rain makes me rush
my poem.

2

The shower wets the benches
we were sitting on

the wind blows hard
and rocks the boat

the southern girls'
red skirts drenched

the northern beauties
seem to have ruined their makeup

the mooring line
saws and cuts the willow

the barge's curtains are soaked
from breaking waves

our going home
will be wet and chilly

as if we were having autumn
right in the heart of summer.

Go to the Poem-A-Day website to comment on this poem, share it on Facebook and Twitter, and much more.

Read more poems from Du Fu: A Life in Poetry

Meet David Young at Indiana University on April 8.

More about Du Fu: A Life in Poetry

About David Young

~ From Knopf Poetry

Vinnie Kinsella - NaPoWriMo

April is National Poetry Month. It’s also National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo).Vinnie Kinsella is another poet doing the poem-a-day thing this month, and he is also the editor of Four and Twenty.

Here are a few of his poems from the first week of NaPoWriMo.

Photos of My Late Grandfather

My face, his image, her pain.
How could a mother in 1978
embrace reflections of a man
buried in 1964?

My Filthy Soul

Upside down I turned my body
wash and squeezed
the vacant bottle.

Is there nothing that can cleanse me?

Devotion

Precisely at midnight his fingers stroked the keys.
The game was afoot, and he was afloat:
twenty-nine poems to go.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Brian Wood - Three Images

I am honored to host three images from a well-known and amazingly talented artist -Brian Wood. Rather than try to do his biography justice on my own, I will include a portion from his site and allow readers to go read the rest if they so choose - the added benefit to me in this is the inclusion of two more images.

All the links here take you to his main page where you can explore the various galleries of his art.

Brian Wood: Introduction to the Artist and the Work

Brian Wood is an artist working with multiple media in New York City. His paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs are exhibited internationally and are held in private and public collections.

Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Tampa Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa; the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Concordia Art Gallery in Montreal; the Museum of Modern Art in Prague; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; and many others.

Brian Wood’s awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for printmaking and photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a number of Canada Council Grants, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He currently teaches at Hunter College in New York and previously taught at Yale University.

Wood uses multiple media to foreground differing awareness in his ongoing exploration of consciousness. He uses different media to both stimulate and respond to various states of mind and multiple levels of thought. The literal is dissolved through metaphor and illusion. Just as trauma can imagine itself into ecstasy, these works transform matter, body, and mind through imagination. Rooted in our biological ground, Wood’s pieces are markers on the shifting borders of self and world.
Brian Wood uses painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Each medium allows different spatial and material illusions and each offers a different experience of time.