Cosmopoetica

“After dusk we go out. The dark powerful paw of the cape lies thrown out into the sea. We walk in swirls of human beings, we are cuffed around kindly, among soft tyrannies, everyone chatters excitedly in the foreign tongue. "No man is an island." We gain strength from them, but also from ourselves. From what is inside that the other person can’t see. That which can only meet itself. The innermost paradox, the underground garage flowers, the vent toward the good dark. A drink that bubbles in an empty glass. An amplifier that magnifies silence. A path that grows over after every step. A book that can only be read in the dark.”

– Tomas Tranströmer
found in The Half-Finished Heaven
(Translated by Robert Bly)

Posted in: Commonplace Book 1 Comment »

As I wrote about a few years ago, Charles Simic is a poet that hip poets love to hate. But I returned to The World Doesn’t End anticipating a pleasurable read and I wasn’t disappointed. Simic is often labeled a "soft surrealist" as if that’s a bad thing. But I have no problem with it. I’ll shamelessly take my surrealism with a dollop of understandability even if that makes me the equivalent of the guy who asks for catsup with his fine steak. I derive little pleasure– and even less glory– from reading poems from which I can derive no meaning.

None of this frittering should be necessary, but that’s the sorry state of poetry affairs at the moment. With that, I’ll dispense with analysis and simply share a few prose poems from the book I enjoyed…

The stone is a mirror which works poorly. Nothing in it but dimness. Your dimness or its dimness, who’s to say? In the hush your heart sounds like a black cricket.

Ambiguity created by a growing uncertainty of antecedents bade us welcome.

"The Art of Making Gods" is what the advertisement said. We were given buckets of mud and shown a star atlas. "The Minotaur doesn’t like whistling," someone whispered, so we resumed our work in silence.

Evening classes. The sky like a mirror of a dead beauty to use as a model. The spit of melancholia’s plague carrier to make it stick.

Things were not as black as somebody painted them. There was a pretty child dressed in black and playing with two black apples. It was either a girl dressed as a boy, or a boy dressed as a girl. Whatever, it had small white teeth. The landscape outside its window had been blackened with a heavy and coarse paint brush. It was all every teleological, except when a child stuck out its red tongue.

She’s pressing me gently with a hot steam iron, or she slips her hand inside me as if I were a sock that needed mending. The thread she uses is like the trickle of my blood, but the needle’s sharpness is all her own.

"You will ruin your eyes, Henrietta, in such bad light," hr mother warns. And she’s right! Never since the beginning of the world has there been so little light. Our winter afternoons have been known at times to last a hundred years.

The ideal spectator who lives only for art, hands folded behind his back. A blank canvas appropriately entitled "Blank" before him. It’s exactly 11 a.m. in the provincial museum. One can hear the rumbling stomach of the uniformed guard, who has the face of someone drowned by moonlight.

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You’re sitting long-legged on a stool in front of The Empornioum hawking 20-minute passes to sticky viewing rooms barely bigger than phone booths. Dream interpretation 101, right? But you’re good. You’ve got a patter so obvious—rip and run, look and leap, five’ll get you twenty—it’s disarming. Suddenly slipping a five into your hand isn’t embarrassing, just playing our part in a cosmic production that might be going right for once. Your lips part just enough that I can believe your smile is real. Without thinking I’m digging in my pocket to pay. Exact change only, you say, looking through me with the steady gaze of the profoundly blind or the batshit insane. Inside the stale-sweat room the selection will be easy: barely legal, POV, she-males, twins-twins-twins. Press a button to burn the dark screen. But out here in the bright, a green flower of greasy bills blooming between my fingers, just this fire. I have no choice and somehow still no idea what to do.

[pad 5.3 - 7/16/09]

Posted in: Poem a Day No Comments »

In the end Medea appears, descending in the Sun God’s chariot, drawn by dragons, the same chariot in which Phaethon scorched and cracked the very earth where mortal Jason stands left with nothing, suffering on the hot sand of Medea’s own scorched earth.

A literary scholar describes the Ancient Greek customs of marriage and mistress and argues that Medea misunderstood these foreign ways. A feminist scours the text for clues, invokes the etymology of hysteria, and elaborates on how Medea was broken by the wretched unfairness unable to understand what she was doing. A philosopher wonders aloud about the inevitability of hubris in the face of our imagined and unimaginable gods.

But Medea knows the simple truth of it: she’d pretended as long as she could to love those whose life is rendered from the first in the language of dying. While her father’s father drove the very sun across the sky she suckled her nameless children as they grew to fit their graves.

Those who possess something of the Gods are not of Earth or Olympus either. They live their lives bewildered, knowing little more of their days than their chimeric ends. We as well blame Medea as we blame the mirror that in turning reflects the light that blinds us and then as quickly becomes nothing, a sliver we couldn’t see even if hadn’t been lit up by the lightning and left alone in the absolute dark.

[pad 4.18 - 7/10/09]

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In fact, many species kill without need, not for protection, but for some kind of primitive pleasure and to satisfy a mindless, formless desire. It’s not just we the flat-toothed and clawless with our cumbersome clothing and disturbing knack for efficiency where it’s needed least. Making the sound of a wet drum, an elephant tramples a strange smelling calf. A black widow eats her knobby, poisonless mate. Dingos eat their own babies. As do those hungry hungry hippos. Even pigs are happy to eat bacon, though that’s unfair… the pig with a mouth full of pork jowl didn’t slaughter his pink, squealing doppelganger, just ate what remained without tasting anything funny. It’s we who anticipate. It’s we who hear the satisfying click of the belt buckle when we strap the car seat in for a ride into the river. It’s we who drive slowly down the wrong streets with a gat and a gleam. It’s me who lies back in the garbage-bag lined bath– having thought every angle through so often there’s no thinking left, just a groove worn of mental pacing– carefully drawing the new curtain completely closed.

[pad 4.16 - 7/8/09]

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We’re in an obscenely tall black 4×4 pickup with no doors or lights. I’m driving with both hands knuckle-white on the wheel. We’re going up one side and down the other of each in an endless series of snow-covered, ice-burdened hills. The brakes hardly work even when I stomp the brake pedal nearly to the floor again and again, trying to build up pressure. The only light is the dying white of a full moon I know somehow is just at the invisible moment when it’s beginning to wane. The ice crystals glitter around us and look more like stars than the real stars, which are steadily moving away from us in every direction. In patches bared of snow by the wind I see that the hills are piles of discard. Household stuff: futons, dishes, books, electronics, rugs, chairs… By definition trash, but not things we throw away often and never en masse. It’s as if there were houses here that vanished with the comic book logic of the Invisible Man, leaving everything behind but themselves, their clothing of drywall, bones of wood and steel, and their veiny pipes. Here and there I see notebooks that belong to me sticking out of the snow. I can’t lean far enough out to grab them and continue to keep control of the truck. You refuse to take the wheel. I know if we leave the indistinct path we’re following we’ll freeze. There’s no hope of fire. But my notebooks! I keep trying to lean left out the door-shaped void and grab them but you hold my right arm by the crook of my elbow and pull me back as we skid in long scarring curves. You pull me hard until I lean into you and shout to let the notebooks go: no one reads anymore, and the pages are silent anyway. I’m pressed against you so hard I can hear your sea sound, your individual static. When I try to talk I taste the hot salt on your neck. My shouts die in the heat of your skin. I can’t explain myself.

[pad 4.14 - 7/6/09]

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There’s a whale shark that’s mostly shadow and moves like a storm, threatening and retreating, and eels doodling like a dirty finger drawing on the other side of the acrylic glass, and gaudy fish dollops of cast-off colors too bright to be part of anything larger we’d believe is real, and dolphins that come and go as they please, deigning occasionally to hover close and eye with contempt we baggy, clumsy mouth breathers, and seals not wholly of either world of air or water, somehow sleek and fat at the same time… but look at the lowly schooling sardines, flashing wet coins now a sheet of lightning, now a storm of oily silver, now what from some angle is a face, and once even a perfect churning sphere, each embodying their simple logic: if it’s small feed; if it’s large flee; look to the you next to you and do what they do.

[pad 4.5 - 6/27/09]

Posted in: Poem a Day 6 Comments »

[image/poem by CURSIVEBUILDINGS]

At the opposite end of the poetry spectrum (granting the weakness of the metaphor) from the avant-garde and experimental faction– but in their own way embodying a similar inquiry into just what poems are– lies prose poetry. As I’ve grown older I’ve become much less concerned with what a poem is, and even less with what a poem isn’t. It’s OK with me if one wants to call these prosy poemy things prose poems, proems, flash fictions, poetic passages, whatever. I just like some of them.

There are different ways to consider the history of the form. The first prose poetry as such emerged in France in the early-mid 1800s, created by writers like Baudelaire and Rimbaud as– at least in part– an act of rebellion against the rigid (perhaps tyrannical) forms of French verse that dominated at the time.

"Be Drunk"

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

–Charles Baudelaire

But we can go back much further in time and find prose poetry… just pull out the Bible and pick at random from Psalms or Ecclesiastes:

Ecclesiastes 12

Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt say, I have no pleasure in them; while the sun, or the light, or the moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds return after the rain: in the day when the keepers of the house shall tremble, and the strong men shall bow themselves, and the grinders cease because they are few, and those that look out of the windows be darkened, and the doors shall be shut in the streets, when the sound of the grinding is low, and he shall rise up at the voice of the bird, and all the daughters of music shall be brought low; also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home, and the mourners go about the streets: or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.

In more recent times, prose poetry waned (but didn’t disappear… see Wilde’s Poems in Prose and many pieces by Gertrude Stein– whose work becomes more and more important to me as time goes by) until a resurgence starting in the 50s with the Beats, then Robert Bly and James Wright, until today when it has become commonplace, a form invoked by poets of all stripes, including some of our most recognized contemporary poets such as James Tate and current Poet Laureate Charles Simic.

I’m not trying to write a history of the form, just provide some context for my favorite prose poems, recognizing how easy it is to argue that they aren’t poems at all, but poetic prose, to which I answer (pick one): so what? and I’m not the only one… Some examples:

“Two Children Threated by a Nightingale”

Attentive as one is to a whisper, the children wade through standing water, uncertain of its depth or source. They find and salvage a sogged train schedule. For their short lives the depot has been boarded shut. One has a flair for death and can fashion a noose from corn silk. One keeps an archive of diaries. One is the movie extra a camera seeks out, lingers on. One reads the subtitles aloud before the characters speak. One imagines sleep to be a furnished room. One imagines rain on the rolled hay, the must of empty stables, the tin-edge of blood on the tongue. By schema and classifications, they are a sister and a brother. Waylaid between this puddle and the next, one creates a theory of the spectral. One fingers through a cache of candies. One is plump and ready for the oven. One could not even flavor a stock pot. One is the overlooked subject. One is a language of mishearings. They cling to the hitherto unknown. When they dissect the bird they find nothing of the song.

–Eric Pankey

"The Toad"

Every so often he jumps, just to make it clear that he is essentially immobile. The jump is in some way like a heartbeat; careful observation makes it plain that the whole of the toad is a heart.

Clamped in a hunk of cold mud, the toad sinks into the winter like a mournful chrysalis. He wakes in the spring knowing that he has not changed into anything else. Dried to his depths, he is more a toad than ever. He waits in silence for the first rains.

And one fine day he heaves himself out of the pliant earth, heavy with moisture, swollen with spiteful sap, like a heart tossed onto the ground. In his sphinxlike posture there is a secret proposition of exchange, and the toad’s ugliness appalls us like a mirror.

–Juan Jose Arreola

“Messenger of Tyranny”

He spits sparks on the night, cinders, love, lightning, broken wings, hate, stars and gold coins which hasten away. He sighs of remorse on the night. At the breath of silence, he grapples with man and knocks him down. He rams the silence down his throat. And, whether in the fermented cities, the red cities where a deep well sleeps at every intersection, where the passerby leave a luminous trail in the shadow; whether in open country sparsely furnished with vague inhabitants; whether in hopeless deserts no one will ever enter, he sows desire in the air and in people’s minds. Men are thrown into a sea of a single night’s sleep. At each half-open door, at each windowpane where the gleam shivers one can overhear what he says, one can hear the dull blows of anguish.

Everything is clenched in the hand that never pardons. Everything is said and everything is set down under the same heading. One day you close your eye to the light of night. All these lamps in the evening. All these lost paths that wind at dawn. All these falling fires from the woods of the heavens. And all the dead dreams that still flicker. Everything will be covered by leaves of lead, by the copper-colored laughs of the days that time incubates. Then the eternal fire will burn your past, your past torn by a sacrilegious hand. Whereupon the insane ravens dismember the gray sky. The black, skipped pages in the book become dog-eared; the book wherein the chords of your life are inscribed.
Nothing is left but the black saliva, streaming in the night, and hate, love, gold, the desire for gold, the freedom without wings, the biting against the chains. And, in the white of the eye, of the heart, on the reverse side of truth, force, the force that weighs down and kills, the whole force.

–Pierre Reverdy

"A Story About the Body"

The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, “I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy,” and when he didn’t understand, “I’ve lost both my breasts.” The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity-like music-withered quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, “I’m sorry I don’t think I could.” He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl-she must have swept the corners of her studio-was full of dead bees.

–Robert Hass

Incidentally, it’s worth noting that the sometimes-surreal, sometimes-absurd prose poems by Russell Edson spawned a genre of their own. I quickly grow weary of Edson’s poems if I over-indulge, but I can’t deny that they carry with them a kind of insistence:

"The Floor"

The floor is something we must fight against. Whilst seemingly mere platform for the human stance, it is that place that men fall to.

I am not dizzy. I stand as a tower, a lighthouse;  the pale ray of my sentiency flowing from my face. But should I go dizzy I crash down into the floor;  my face into the floor, my attention bleeding into  the cracks of the floor.

Dear horizontal place, I do not wish to be a rug. Do not pull at the difficult head, this teetering bulb of dread and dream…

–Russell Edson

Posted in: Art & Life & Politics 3 Comments »

[photo by Gavatron]

“Messenger of Tyranny”

He spits sparks on the night, cinders, love, lightning, broken wings, hate, stars and gold coins which hasten away. He sighs of remorse on the night. At the breath of silence, he grapples with man and knocks him down. He rams the silence down his throat. And, whether in the fermented cities, the red cities where a deep well sleeps at every intersection, where the passerby leave a luminous trail in the shadow; whether in open country sparsely furnished with vague inhabitants; whether in hopeless deserts no one will ever enter, he sows desire in the air and in people’s minds. Men are thrown into a sea of a single night’s sleep. At each half-open door, at each windowpane where the gleam shivers one can overhear what he says, one can hear the dull blows of anguish.

Everything is clenched in the hand that never pardons. Everything is said and everything is set down under the same heading. One day you close your eye to the light of night. All these lamps in the evening. All these lost paths that wind at dawn. All these falling fires from the woods of the heavens. And all the dead dreams that still flicker. Everything will be covered by leaves of lead, by the copper-colored laughs of the days that time incubates. Then the eternal fire will burn your past, your past torn by a sacrilegious hand. Whereupon the insane ravens dismember the gray sky. The black, skipped pages in the book become dog-eared; the book wherein the chords of your life are inscribed. Nothing is left but the black saliva, streaming in the night, and hate, love, gold, the desire for gold, the freedom without wings, the biting against the chains. And, in the white of the eye, of the heart, on the reverse side of truth, force, the force that weighs down and kills, the whole force.

– Pierre Reverdy (translated by John Ashbery)
from Pierre Reverdy: Selected Poems

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