H2O.

Just to mix it up, here’s this from Carl Sandburg:

Metamorphosis

When water turns ice does it remember

one time it was water?

When ice turns back into water does it

remember it was ice?

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Waves of Irony.

So I guess this is the latest installment in the ongoing series of posts that I like to call “Poetry Written by People Better at Poetry than Me”. I recently finished a collection called Questions About Angels by Billy Collins and it was quite good and let me tell you, that man can write a poem about a hangover like nobody else (track down a poem called “Saturday Morning”). But not just that. He is funny and tender and sometimes he tosses off little lines that are startling in how good they are, like in the poem “The Dead” when he just nonchalantly says, “they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of/heaven”

He is that kind of poet, the aw-schucks did that thing I just wrote break your heart a little? kind of poet. Below are some of my favorite little bits from the collection. I know it is sacrilege to extract them from their home this way, but why don’t you just go read the book yourself if you care so much? Huh?

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The Valley of Forgiveness is lined with condominiums

and chain saws are howling in the Forest of Despair.

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It is a small noun about the size of a mouse,

one that will be seldom used by anyone,

like a synonym for isthmus,

but they are pursuing the creature zealously.

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I am concentration itself: I exist in a universe

where there is nothing but sex, death, and typewriting.

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It is enough to realize that every common object

in this sunny little room will outlive me—

the carpet, radio, bookstand and rocker.

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Ah, but tonight I will drink red wine at dinner.

I will continue to drink red wine after dinner.

Then I will lie down in the dark greens of the lawn

and think of something entirely new.

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The small camel leaves his common place

on the front of the pack of cigarettes

and sways away across the floorboards in search of water.

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I will stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of cows.

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I wonder if I have become smaller or has the bedroom

always been the size of a western state.

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Keeping still

and emitting thin, evenly spaced

waves of irony

may help.

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Below is the complete poem “Vade Mecum”.

I want the scissors to be sharp

and the table to be perfectly level

when you cut me out of my life

and paste me into that book you always carry.

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I’m not going to excerpt from them, because it would ruin their effect, but if you have the chance you should look up his poems “Candle Hat” (about Goya) and “American Sonnett” (about postcards), and “History Teacher” (about a history teacher trying to save his students from the weight of history) and “The Death of Allegory” (about the death of allegory).

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How to Play the Piano.

I have been reading a Bukowski collection called Play the piano drunk like a percussion instrument until the fingers begin to bleed a bit and it is an interesting mix of what we think of when we think of poetry and also some narrative-like pieces. Some of them are as quintessentially reprobate as we always expect from Bukowski (like “fire station” wherein he pimps out the woman he is with without her knowing), while others have that jagged and beautiful sorrow that nobody else seems to be able to do quite as well.

It is a kind of travesty to read a poem and then just go, “Oh I love these two lines!” but I am going to do it anyway.

These are some of the bits I’ve enjoyed the most:

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torn by a temporary wind

we come back together again

-

what kind of shit is

this?

it’s so easy to be a poet

and so hard to be

a man.

-

we came out of the bar

because we were out of money

but we had a couple of wine bottles

in the room.

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I’ve learned to feel good when

I feel good.

-

there is a mirror behind the

bar.

the reflections are not

kind.

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the ladies of summer will love

so long as the price is not

forever

-

I sit at the window

with her electric typewriter

and watch young girls’ asses

which are attached to

young girls

-

eyes like a Russian pianist

-

it irritated me to be almost murdered by a

fool in a sequin jacket

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the boxing matches and the racetracks are

temples of learning

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you son of a bitch, she said, I am

trying to build a meaningful

relationship.

you can’t build it with a hammer,

he said.

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high lonely drunken grin of grief

I love you

-

I am dying of sadness and alcohol

he said to me over the bottle

on a soft Thursday afternoon

in an old hotel room by the train depot.

I have, he went on, betrayed myself with

belief, deluded myself with love

tricked myself with sex.

the bottle is damned faithful, he said,

the bottle will not lie.

meat is cut as roses are cut

men die as dogs die

love dies like dogs die,

he said.

listen, Ronny, I said,

lend me 5 dollars.

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Sexy Poetry!

For one of my classes I am reading a book of poetry called “Country Between Us” by a very skilled poet named Carolyn Forche. She can turn a phase, believe me that. Of Americans she says:

“It is/that you were born to an island of greed/and grace where you have this sense/of yourself as apart from others.”

So obviously she’s not a rah-rah-rah happy-happy-times poet, but she’s good at what she does.

What’s interesting about her then, is what she does. What she does is write poetry that’s basically a kind of tragedy porn. She writes about Eastern Europe after WWII and it feels exactly gray enough. When she writes about the civil war in El Salvador what she ends up producing is some of the most fearful and disturbing lines I’ve ever read about oppression and torture, or just generally:

“Tell them about the razor, the live wire,/dry ice and concrete, grey rats and above all/who fucked her, how many times and when./Tell them about retaliation: Jose lying/on the flat bed truck, waving his stumps/in your face, his hands cut off by his/captors and thrown to the many acres/of cotton, lost, still and holding/the last few lumps of leeched earth.”

She also goes overboard from time to time. She has a poem called “Endurance” and while it doesn’t suck, it seems to deal with how hard it is for her to adjust to generally civil American life after having been in these awful and war torn places, but she doesn’t seem to be able to disengage from her muse-of-human-suffering voice when she talks about coming back from Germany to New York and then Virginia. She says:

“the Roanoke valley/where mountains hold the breath/of the dead between them”

And that’s when I was all like, “Lady, calm the fuck down. I’ve seen those mountains and they’re goddamn gorgeous.”

But the only reason I’m wasting your time with all of this, is this: despite her passion for poetry that makes me want to cram a phillips head screwdriver through my face, she wrote a few massively sexy lines and I think that she probably doesn’t even know it because they’re sandwiched in between a couple stanzas that are DEEP and MEANINGFUL and TRAGIC and STUFF.

In academia I would get my ass kicked for cherry picking lines like this, but I don’t actually care. Here are a few lines from a poem called, “Photography of My Room”. These are the sexy lines and the only sexy lines in the poem:

“In the notebooks you will find/those places: the damp inner thighs,/the delicate rash left by kisses,/fingers on the tongue, a swallow/of brandy, a fire.”

How hot is that? That’s some Fifty Shades of Grey stuff, but with better words!

I’m not going to talk anymore. I just want you to have some time to read those lies again.

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Tremble.

This has been on my mind alot lately. If I had biceps, I would get this tattooed on it:

we are here

to laugh

and live our lives

so well that

death

will tremble

to take us

- Charles Bukowski -


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Empty Wheelchair.

I’m reading a poetry collection by a man named Patrick Ryan Frank. His initials are PRF and to me that sounds like it should be some sort of degree. Like an MFA or a DDS.

The collection is called “HOW THE LOSERS LOVE WHAT’S LOST” and below is one of my favorite poems so far. (This, BTW, is how one is supposed to write poetry, in case I have fooled you into thinking that mine is any good.)

IT ISN’T PARANOIA IF IT’S TRUE

An empty wheelchair in an empty park,

parked car packed full of children’s toys – I can’t

quite shake the feeling things are happening

to other people, either miracles

or something awful, but not to me, as if

my name is off the list for some event

the universe is having: massive party,

prison riot, something half the town

has found an invitation to, like money

in a brand new jacket pocket, like bits of glass

in a cereal box, but I still have some hope

I’ll open a door and find a room of people

all strangers, shouting, Surprise, shouting, Look out!

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Plastic.

Right now I am reading a collection of poems called “Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty” by a very smart and funny poet named Tony Hoagland, whom I have never heard of before.

I was reading right along and he has a poem titled “Plastic” which is about plastic. He says amazing things like:

You could mull over the ethics of enslaving matter/even while feeling admiration for the genius it takes/to persuade a molecule to become part of a casserole container.

But then I was stopped dead in my tracks by a few lines which very nearly could have been about a fight I vividly remember having last year. He writes this:

- Or in another case, the blue polyethylene water bottle/sitting on a table in the park on Saturday/between two people having a talk about their relationship/- which I could tell was probably near its end/since the various lubrications/usually coating the human voice/were all worn away, leaving just the rough, gritty surfaces/of need and fear/exposing and rubbing on each other.

I mean, wow.

It just reminded me of how good and beautiful and honest good writing can be. It has been awhile since I have been able to write that way, but I am going to re-devote myself to it. I need to, for me, and also so that I will have something to talk to Mister Hoagland about should I ever meet him in an airport bar.

Also – and this is how good this guy is – he followed the passage above with this one below:

I wonder if it would have done any good then/if I had walked over and explained to them/about Plastic?/About how much easier it is to stretch than/human nature

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