jim ralston | low noon

“Love, Chagall,” by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH No.380 | August 20, 2012

JIM RALSTON

Low Noon

Long after our last slow day together,
say, a campfire, a walk in the woods,
getting lost and not caring;

a year since the last rain-soaked note
under my wiper blade in the parking lot,
how she’d thought about my offer;

months after we both knew it was over,
since we last kissed or had a talk
long enough to be nuanced,

there comes a second kind of silence.
Drizzly and cold, say, at twelve o’clock,
could be today, November tenth.

The phone doesn’t ring, the postman
doesn’t bring the unexpected letter.
I forget to check the box.

The trees have dropped their leaves.
The noon sun barely tops the trees.
I’m not thinking of her either.

[from THE SUN, Sept. 2012]

norbert blei | catching up: death notices & last words

NOTES from the UNDERGROUND  # 216 (& Poetry Dispatch) | August 18 , 2012

Catching Up: Death Notices & Last Words

by
Norbert Blei

“Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say and not giving a damn.” –Gore Vidal

I’ve sung this song before: I’m having a hard time keeping up with everything. But I sing it again. The too many websites I maintain; writing my own books and other works; publishing the books of others I have every intention and desire to publish by my own small press, Cross+Roads Press; promoting neglected writers and publishers I promise myself (sometimes them) to bring to light—bur too often disappointing us both when I fail to do so for any number of the usual reasons; falling behind on preparations to teach, do readings and/or talks; maintaining communications (e-mail, snail mail, phone, texting, personal meetings) among a network of writers, family, friends…not trying to mention maintain some kind of private and social life beyond the written word—though I may be kidding myself since my life, for more than fifty years of it at least, one way or another, has been associated with the word and getting it out there.

So, yes, I’m behind. Again. Yes, I’m tired. More so than usual. But yes I’m enthused and renewed by all that I do and the many lives I try to reach… so it seems I must continue because this is who I am or seem to have become. Given all that’s on my plate, and no matter how frustrated I become every day, the writing is also on the wall: I’m going to leave a hell of a lot of unfinished business when the light goes out. And I’m just going to have to live with it. Saddest of all, the number of my own minimally noted and planned, partially written, almost finished, totally unwritten books–except for their daily life in my head, where I am an accomplished writer beyond belief, writing two or three books a week in thin air! How I wish there were more time. Or I had done it differently. Or I was different. But as Gore Vidal suggests in that opening quote: “Style is knowing who you are…” It takes time enough to just arrive there.

Which brings me back to the beginning of today’s commentary, which has been on my mind for sometime.

I wanted to say a few words about Vidal’s death…as well as a number of others, recently and not so recently…Christopher Hitchens, Ray Bradbury, Harry Crews…not to mention small press writers, Leonard Cirino, Todd Moore. etc. but I never got around to it. What a loss, all of them, Vidal especially. We can’t replace the likes of him, such truthsayers, on the American landscape. I guess ‘acerbic’ is the right word when it comes to him: “I am an obsessive rewriter, doing one draft and then another and another, usually five. In a way, I have nothing to say, but a great deal to add.” said Gore Vidal on writing.

He had much worth noting about the arts. Things many of us in practice need to be reminded of: “This is not at all bad, except as prose.” Or, “Whenever a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.” Vidal’s line: Though I could take him or leave him when it came to Warhol’s art, Vidal’s critique always makes me smile: “Andy Warhol is the only genius I’ve ever known with an I.Q. of 60.”

When it comes to politics in this country…how we will miss him in the upcoming election.
“Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.”

Better yet, weaving a writer’s words into the American political fabric: “As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests.”

I’m especially mindful of authors and artists who refuse titles and honors by one interest or another: “I don’t want anything,” said Gore Vidal. “I don’t want a job. I don’t want to be respectable. I don’t want prizes. I turned down the National Institute of Arts and Letters when I was elected to it in 1976 on the grounds that I already belonged to the Diners Club.”

He IS missed.

Speaking of last words. I remain a huge lover of the works of James Joyce and have given up trying to defend him–especially ULYSSES. You either love him or hate him. Though you may hate him at one point in your life…give him time. We read him, are ‘taught’ him too early.

He needs to be aged. Don’t read or revisit ULYSSES until at least the age of 40.

I love this recent rebuke that appeared in the NYTimes. I have read only a little of Paul Coelho, but it did my heart good to read how Guardian critic Stuart Kelly responded to Coelho’s remarks:

Since its publication in 1922, James Joyce’s “Ulysses” has been put on trial for obscenity and subjected to reckless over-correction of its punctuation. But now the novel, widely considered one of the greatest works of the 20th century, has suffered per­haps its gravest indignity: being insulted by the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. In an interview with the Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo, Mr. Coelho…whose mystical novels, including “The Alche­mist,” have sold a reported 140 million copies worldwide, declared that Joyce, right, had dam­aged the 20th-century novel by reducing it to “pure style.” “There is nothing there,” Mr. Coelho said. “If you dissect ‘Ulysses,’ it gives you a tweet.” Mr. Coelho, described in the article as being online “almost 24 hours a day,” also boasted of his social media prowess, declaring: “Twitter is my bar. I sit at the counter and listen to the conver­sations, starting others, feeling the atmosphere.” But within hours some corners of the bar had turned distinctly against him. “Coelho is, of course, entitled to his dumb opinion,” the critic Stuart Kelly wrote in a much retweeted post on The Guardian of London’s books blog, “just as I am entitled to think Coelho’s work is a nauseous broth of egomania and snake-oil mysti­cism with slightly less intellect, empathy and ver­bal dexterity than the week-old Camembert I threw out yesterday.” — jennifer schuessler NEW YORK TIMES 8.10.12

I leave you with this:

“Writers, since they have so many words, often have the last one.” –Gore Vidal.

vasko popa | ted hughes | poetry is

Photo by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH #379 | July 24, 2012

Editor’s Note: It was a restless night. Though I had three or four or more other books going, none of them spoke at this hour in the morning, flaunted their covers, made note of the various placements of their bookmarks (beginning, middle, end) or said: “Continue.” “Read me NOW!” “Only 20 more pages to the end…”

Instead I got up from my chair, roamed the bookshelves, saw a book titled POETRY IS, discovered it was written by Ted Hughes (wondered just what it was all about)…realized I had not read Hughes in sometime…saw that the book was published in 1970…(with a receipt revealing a Chicago purchase)…wondering now if I had ever even read the book—but there, some of my underlining…a tell-tale sign I was here before…then settled into my chair again to see what POETRY IS is all about.

Instructional. It looks like a helpful book for poets starting out or stuck. It looks like it might benefit those uncreative teachers teaching creative writing workshops who are searching for somebody else’s ideas to teach writing, instead of exploring the depth of their own experience and techniques. The Table of Contents includes: CAPUTURING ANIMALS, WIND AND WEATHER, WRITING ABOUT PEOPLE…etc. With lots of good example from established poets, including: Elizabeth Bishop, Miroslav Holub, Theodore Roethke, Eudora Welty, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Etc. and, of course, plenty of poems by Ted Hughes.

Actually, it’s a pretty okay book. I’m glad I rediscovered it—if, for no other reason to remind myself: I DON’T NEED TO BUY ANY MORE BOOKS. Everything I will ever need is here. I have over 3000 of them on my shelves, some never read, others read and forgotten, some to be reread every few years…not to mention all the incredible little mags and small press publications (of every shape and size including mimeographed and Xeroxed pages) by some of the best writers in the world—most of whom will never find a national audience, a big publisher, a faithful audience of more than 50 readers (most of them friends)…writers and words destined for obscurity. YOU need (WE need) to keep these writers alive by bringing them back to life in our own libraries, by reading this significant, almost invisible literature that keeps the fields fertile. (I will return to my shelves a little later and rescue one of these writers from obscurity myself—for a half hour or so.)

BUY NO MORE BOOKS!

When I open the Hughes book, what do I immediately find but “The Small Box” written by an old, long lost (from my consciousness) Serbian poet-friend, Vasko Popa. And in the intro to the book, written by Hughes, what did I underline over 50 years ago but a passage on ‘what poetry is”.

Later the next afternoon. neither heeding or remembering my own advice…I find myself online with a bookstore…ordering a book of Vasko Popa poems…a copy of STONE ARABIA by Dana Spiotta…another copy of Stanley Kunitz’s, THE WILD BRAID (hard back) because I just gave mine to a friend…THE GENTLE INSURRECTION by Doris Betts, ZONA by Geoff Dyer, ALMOST THERE by Nuala O’Faolain…

Hopeless, utterly hopeless…I can’t afford these!… I don’t have time enough…

Which is precisely why I need them. — Norbert Blei

The Small Box

The small box gets its first teeth
And its small length
Its small width and small emptiness
And all that it has got

The small box is growing bigger
And now the cupboard is in it
That it was in before

And it grows bigger and bigger and bigger
And now has in it the room
And the house and the town and the land
And the world it was in before

The small box remembers it childhood
And by overgreat longing
It becomes a small box again

Now in the small box
Is the whole world quite tiny
You can easily put it in a pocket
Easily steal it easily lose it

Take care of the small box

vasko popa

The struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words, to regain his genuine self, has been man’s principal occupation, wherever he could find leisure for it, ever since he first grew this enormous surplus of brain. Men have invented religion to do this for others. But to do it for themselves, they have invented art—music, painting, dancing, sculpture, and the activity that includes all these, which is poetry.

Because it is occasionally possible, just for brief moments, to find the words that will unlock the doors of all those many mansions inside the head and express something—perhaps not much, just something—of the crush of information that presses in on us from the way a crow flies over and the way a man walks and the look of a street and from what we did one day a dozen years ago. Words that will express something of the deep complexity that makes us precisely the way we are, from the momentary effect of the barometer to the force that created men distinct from trees. Something of the inaudible music that moves us along in our bodies from moment to moment like water in a river. Something of the spirit of the snowflake in the water of the river.

Something of the duplicity and the relativity and the merely fleeting quality of all this. Something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness. And when words can manage something of this, and manage it in a moment of time, and in that same moment make out of it all the vital signature of a human being—not of an atom, or of a geometrical diagram, or of a heap of lenses—but a human being, we call it poetry.

TED HUGHES

[From POETRY IS by Ted Hughes, Doubleday, 1970]

lawrence ferlinghetti | i am waiting

Photo by Norbert Blei

POETRY DISPATCH #378 | July 4, 2012

LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI

I Am Waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting
for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting
for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Second Coming
and I am waiting
for a religious revival
to sweep thru the state of Arizona
and I am waiting
for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored
and I am waiting
for them to prove
that God is really American
and I am waiting
to see God on television
piped onto church altars
if only they can find
the right channel
to tune in on
and I am waiting
for the Last Supper to be served again
with a strange new appetizer
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for my number to be called
and I am waiting
for the Salvation Army to take over
and I am waiting
for the meek to be blessed
and inherit the earth
without taxes
and I am waiting
for forests and animals
to reclaim the earth as theirs
and I am waiting
for a way to be devised
to destroy all nationalisms
without killing anybody
and I am waiting
for linnets and planets to fall like rain
and I am waiting for lovers and weepers
to lie down together again
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed
and I am anxiously waiting
for the secret of eternal life to be discovered
by an obscure general practitioner
and I am waiting
for the storms of life
to be over
and I am waiting
to set sail for happiness
and I am waiting
for a reconstructed Mayflower
to reach America
with its picture story and tv rights
sold in advance to the natives
and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting for the day
that maketh all things clear
and I am awaiting retribution
for what America did
to Tom Sawyer
and I am waiting
for Alice in Wonderland
to retransmit to me
her total dream of innocence
and I am waiting
for Childe Roland to come
to the final darkest tower
and I am waiting
for Aphrodite
to grow live arms
at a final disarmament conference
in a new rebirth of wonder

I am waiting
to get some intimations
of immortality
by recollecting my early childhood
and I am waiting
for the green mornings to come again
youth’s dumb green fields come back again
and I am waiting
for some strains of unpremeditated art
to shake my typewriter
and I am waiting to write
the great indelible poem
and I am waiting
for the last long careless rapture
and I am perpetually waiting
for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn
to catch each other up at last
and embrace
and I am awaiting
perpetually and forever
a renaissance of wonder

[ from A Coney Island of the Mind. Copyright © 1958 New Directions, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti]

william stafford | purifying the language of the tribe

Man and Woman by Edvard Munch

POETRY DISPATCH No. 377 | July 1, 2012

WILLIAM STAFFORD

PURIFYING THE LANGUAGE OF THE TRIBE

Walking away means

“Goodbye.”

 

Pointing a knife at your stomach means

“Please don’t say that again.”

 

Leaning toward you means

“I love you.”

 

Raising a finger means

“I enthusiastically agree.”

 

“Maybe” means

“No.”

 

“Yes” means

“Maybe.”

 

Looking like this at you means

“You had your chance.”

[from:THE DARKNESS AROUND US IS DEEP]

vera pavlova | heaven is not verbose: a notebook

POETRY DISPATCH No. 376 | June 20, 2012

VERA PAVLOVA

Heaven is Not Verbose: A Notebook

• My writing: hard boiled. My life: scrambled soft.

• An elderly poet called me “the most beautiful woman in the world” because he could not recall my name.

• Mandelstam: “Poetry is the certainty of being right.” Brodsky: “Poetry is the school of uncertainty.” I am not certain about any assertion.

• Poetry should be written the way adultery is committed: on the run, on the sly, during the time not accounted for. And then you come home, as if nothing ever happened.

• Pick a piece of wood floating in the river and follow it down the current with your glance, keeping the eyes constantly on it, without getting ahead of the current. This is the way poetry should be read: at the pace of a line.

• Went to bed with an unfinished poem in my mouth and could not kiss.

• Inspiration: when I have confidence in myself.

• –I will never use makeup as long as I live, and then at the funeral parlor they will put it on me
  –Not if you expressly forbid it in your will.
  –Why should I? Let them: for once in my life I will look pretty.

• To write in spite of everything, even when generally speaking there is nothing to spite.

• To help a poem hatch, I went to get some groceries. Paid the cashier, got my change, came home with a finished poem and no groceries.

• How do I feel about people who do not understand my poetry? I understand them.

• Being well-known means knowing almost nothing as to who knows you and what they might know about you.

• Suddenly you realize that only what you have put into poems can be considered lived through. That is how you become a poet. And at that point you begin, consciously or otherwise, living the kind of life that is fraught with poetry. That is how you cease being human. The former happens abruptly, the latter gradually, both irrevocably.

[From: POETRY, April, 2012

Vera Pavlova was born in Moscow. She is the author of seventeen collections of poetry and five opera librettos. Her first collection in English is IF THERE IS SOMETHING TO DESIRE, Knopf, 2010]