Windows

Windows Series

The Nervous Breakdown

The Nervous Breakdown, a literary magazine and much more, has published a poem of mine.
Thanks to Wendy Chin-Tanner for helping with the publication.

Here is the link:

My Old Calculator

Inside  

Out to get a breath of air

I heard buzzing within the siding.

Was it bees or wasps grinding to stay in

or to get out, and above, a tiny tap

of toes walking across the eaves, but then

a ping, like radar, or is it sonar that bats use?

Hidden from view in the wood and aluminum

a hive of bugs provides snacks for a pair of bats.

Little Brown Bats photo from Animal Diversity Web

Mud Dauber photo from Pest Control Canada website

Howl

Howl with James Franco

The movie begins with a recitation of the poem as it might have been delivered in a dark subterranean coffee shop in San Francisco in 1955, shortly after it was written.  James Franco wears the thick black horn rimmed glasses, the white t shirt under the buttoned down white shirt, just the way that Ginsberg wore these things.  Franco’s voice takes on that raspy incantatory drone  that was Ginsberg’s performance persona.  The voice, and the juicy words that run on and on return us to 1955 – but do these lines speak to us now as they did in 1955?  Perhaps we do not need them now as we did then.

James Franco

The opening titles show glimpses of the animation to come.  Armies of men carry identical brief cases, wear identical hats, march across an unknown grey city.  Photographs of Ginsberg and Orlovsky, his lifelong partner, actual photographs, look a bit scruffier than the cleaned up actors who play their counterparts.  The cold war is represented by missiles pointing ominously toward us the viewers.   In this context, the beat poets were railing against conformity, against war, against restrictions of all kinds.

Franco plays Ginsberg especially well when he is full of longing.  He speaks to an unseen interviewer (the script comes almost entirely from transcripts, interviews, and the poetry itself) about his journey from a young poet wannabe in the shadow of his straight traditional poet father.  His sexuality he hid from his parents.  He was put in an insane asylum when he was 21 ostensibly because of his homosexuality, and was released when he agreed to become straight.  After two years of working in advertising and rejecting his true nature, his therapist encouraged him to do what he wanted, and the rest is history.

Allen Ginsberg

The animations in the movie are distracting.  The images of star bursts that denote orgasms, the explicit sexual couplings, detract from the power of the words.  But this is a movie. I can see why the filmmakers thought so much time with just the words-- staring at the screen, listening to Franco recite, might be boring without some action.  

 How gratifying to hear a poet's words treated with the seriousness of a love affair, or a war, or a heist, or some other common subjects of movies.  I remember when the movie came out about Sylvia Plath.  They had everything in that movie except the poetry.  This movie has the poetry front and center and I am grateful.

Poets Forum on Contemporary Poetry:Wild and Strange Language

Lyn Hejinian

Carl Phillips

Ron Padgett

Kay Ryan

The four poets sat in a row in front of microphones, Lyn Hejinian the language poet,  on the far left.  She began by saying in her high girlish voice, "Here we are in a row, I must be "A".  Kay Ryan piped up quite promptly "And I must be "Z".  Chortles all around.  We knew where the two poets stood on the meaning, or lack of meaning, in poetry, especially when it comes to language.

Hejinian read examples of what she thought of as showing wild and strange language.  (No poet would like to be accused of using tame and ordinary language, she said.)

First came Robert Grenier, from his book "Sentences", available online.

She may or may not have read this:

PAW

he barks at things gone by

two trees

stepping through the water to the rocks

five sound shut doors

LOOKING AT FIRE

ashes to ashes

looking at the fire

at has been added

Hejinian champions  the use of language in an aesthetic sense.

Padgett ruminated on his childhood a bit, thought of how language is enjoyed sometimes without meaning necessarily.  Children like to  repeat sounds over and over again until they are drained of meaning and remembered as something else, something coming in to the ear.  He also enjoyed discovering the concrete poets, the wild poets whose works contain pure sounds and playful shapes on the page.  Later, he pointed out that William Carlos Williams' poems in Spring and All were electrifying.  The red wheelbarrow poem said it so plainly.  Padgett is charming and funny, and full of plain spoken truths, with a childlike simplicity that is seductive.

 Phillips  handed out a leaflet with two poems : on one side from Laura Jensen, "Heavy Snowfall in a Year Gone Past," which ends with the moon looking  down and judging,

not the maze of anger

but the fury

at the wasted years,

at the waste of the tender snow
Wasted, wasted, the birds crackle,
wasted on you.

There was also a deeply erotic beautifully structured poem by John Wieners, "Anniversary".
The diction changes mid line

Cigarette between his lips, would they were mine
by this present moon swear allegiance
if he ever look, see clouds and beaches
in the sky, by stars lend his eyes shine.

Kay Ryan had brought this poem by Robert Frost.  She asked if we received the handout.  When there was an awkward silence, she replied, "I didn't bring one."

A Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

What excited Ryan was how poetry could change a person.  The person in the snow was not in a good place, and as a result of the snow falling on him, had entered a new mood.  Such simplicity, and tight little form has the power to create a feeling.

Hejinian challenged that poetry did not have to do that, that was too restrictive.

"Restrictive!" cried Ryan.

And so Poet A and Poet Z laid out their positions.  It was an argument we could have used more of.  But it was enough for me to understand the difference between Hejinian's point of view about poetry, that it should have as much breadth and range and abstraction and freedom as jazz or a Jackson Pollock painting, and Kay Ryan who wants her poems to have words with meaning.   With no meaning, you have no power, she claims, and I agree. 

Inside the Confessional

Saturday afternoons we went to Confession.

That gave us all day to play.

The dirt got to be soft with kids going back

and forth, a perfect spot for playing marbles. 

With a stick we drew a circle in the dirt

and in the middle of the circle was a hole.

We aimed at the hole to win.

We fought over cats eyes and keepsies.

Sure, there was cheating in that small place,

leaning down in the dirt. We got really

sweaty in the summer playing there.

After, our mothers turned on the sprinklers

and we rinsed off so we wouldn’t have to take a bath.

Inside the church, by the darkened booth,

 a line would form for the nice priest

who gave easy penances:  three Hail Marys,

that was it, we were off scot free,

safe from the licking flames of hell. 

Monsignor McDowell never had a line.

He said our tongues would turn to worms

 if we kept up our lying to our little brother

about where we kept our candy.    

We held our breath and lied about our sins.

Once inside, we were invisible,

hidden from the world, just us

and the plaited rush partition that let

our sins into the priest and his forgiveness

fly out to us on the other side.  

We listened for the sound of the shift

of the slot.  Then we would begin

to list our wickedness. The penance lifted

the grit and washed the tiny flecks of mud.

All clean,  we were free to go out and sin again.

The house sparrows have no houses.

They settle in the cross beams of steel

posts suspended from street lamps.

You might hear a cheep and looking up

see feathers sprouting

from the cold metal hollows.  The proud

mothers sing their hearts out. 

Success!  Success!  Success!

Dean Street at Carlton Avenue
Prospect Heights
Brooklyn, New York

Photo by Tracy Collins 

Heather McHugh

Wednesday night, the Poetry Society hosted a conversation with the brainy poet, Heather McHugh.  The evening was billed as a

NEW SALON: READINGS AND CONVERSATIONS
Heather McHugh, with Robert N. Casper

A reading and conversation in an intimate format.

Robert Casper introduced the poet as a former teacher of his, and it was clear how much respect and awe and admiration he had for her.  However, when he asked her to start the evening with a reading, she was expecting conversation, and her post-it note laden notes on topics showed that she was prepared for an interview more than for a poetry reading.

McHugh was good-natured and even joyous throughout her remarks, which were many and beautifully spoken in perfect English about what has meaning to her in her writing.  " I write in order to find what I mean," she said at one point.  She read the poem that was provided for those of us who did not come with books in hand, "Fastener,"

Fastener

One as is as another as.
One with is with another with;

one against's against all others and one of
of all the ofs on earth feels chosen.  So the man

can't help his fastening on many
(since the likes of him like

look-alikes)...When the star-shower crosses
the carnival sky, then the blues of the crowd

try to glisten, to match it; and the two
who work late in the butcher-house touch,

reaching just the same moment
for glue and for hatchet.

When I heard her read it it made sense.   Reading it on the page I struggle with the meaning and the sounds crashing into each other.    Those first four lines trip me up with their use of conjunctions and prepositions as nouns.  But McHugh's playfulness and lightness of touch made it all clear.  She was almost apologetic about how she got expressive after the first four lines, as if it were the weakness in her writing, when in fact it is the part that I like best.

She was very at ease riffing on ideas, pulling snatches of poems by Emily Dickinson out of her fecund brain by heart, and she quoted Borges, and Wittgenstein ("Our lives are endless precisely in the ways our visual lives are endless.")

Here is what I remember:

--We live in our senses.  All five senses have verbs that can be used either in the transitive or intransitive case.

--It is important to entertain both sides of every question, consider opposites, to not just go for the knee jerk response or emotional simplicity of things.  Dare to be complex.

--The root of skepticism is in looking. 

There is a beautiful more accessible poem on the poets.org website,

What He Thought. 

For Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy
and, full of our feeling for
ourselves (our sense of being
Poets from America) we went
from Rome to Fano, met
the Mayor, mulled a couple
matters over. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious
"cheap date" (no explanation lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers we

could recognize our counterparts: the academic,
the apologist, the arrogant, the amorous,
the brazen and the glib. And there was one
administrator (The Conservative), in suit
of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide
with measured pace and uninflected tone
narrated sights and histories
the hired van hauled us past.
Of all he was most politic--
and least poetic-- so
it seemed. Our last
few days in Rome 
I found a book of poems this
unprepossessing one had written: it was there
in the pensione room (a room he'd recommended)
where it must have been abandoned by
the German visitor (was there a bus of them?) to whom
he had inscribed and dated it a month before. I couldn't
read Italian either, so I put the book
back in the wardrobe's dark. We last Americans

were due to leave
tomorrow. For our parting evening then
our host chose something in a family restaurant,
and there we sat and chatted, sat and chewed, till,
sensible it was our last big chance to be Poetic, make
our mark, one of us asked

"What's poetry?
Is it the fruits and vegetables
and marketplace at Campo dei Fiori

or the statue there?" Because I was
the glib one, I identified the answer
instantly, I didn't have to think-- "The truth
is both, it's both!" I blurted out. But that
was easy. That was easiest
to say. What followed taught me something
about difficulty, 

for our underestimated host spoke out
all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents
Giordano Bruno, brought
to be burned in the public square
because of his offence against authority, which was to say
the Church. His crime was his belief
the universe does not revolve around
the human being: God is no
fixed point or central government
but rather is poured in waves, through
all things: all things
move. "If God is not the soul itself,
he is the soul OF THE SOUL of the world." Such was
his heresy. The day they brought him forth to die

they feared he might incite the crowd (the man
was famous for his eloquence). And so his captors
placed upon his face
an iron mask
in which he could not speak.

That is how they burned him.
That is how he died, 
without a word,
in front of everyone. And poetry--

(we'd all put down our forks by now, to listen to
the man in gray; he went on softly)-- poetry

is what he thought, but did not say.

Connie Wanek, Duluth poet

 Connie Wanek's book, On Speaking Terms, is reviewed in the NYT Book Review this week, and the short excerpts appealed to me, so I found more about her, and these two poems posted on the Minnesota Arts website.


Checkers

Red was passion, black was strength.
Yet one checker always had gone missing.
a deserter discovered eventually
cowering under a chair cushion.
What was there to fear?
Only time itself would be killed.

I was one who never planned ahead,
who sent my infantry into any open field.
Under my command they aspired
merely to be captured,
jumped and hauled off, bearing the smiles
of the successfully defeated.

Who really wanted to be kinged?
To stagger under a crown
heavy as a headstone,
to wander the board without a court
or even the escort of a fool?
What was glory? I never understood the word.

Often some idle soul of a certain age
taught checkers to the young,
offering stratagems
continually overruled by blind luck.
Then came snacks and naps
and afterwards, the balance of the day.


Hartley Field

The wind cooled as it crossed the open pond
and drove little waves towards us,
brisk, purposeful waves
that vanished at our feet—such energy
thwarted by so little elevation.
The wind was endless, seamless,
old as the earth.
Insects came
to regard us with favor. I felt them alight,
felt their minute footfalls.
I was a challenge, an Everest …

And you, whom I have heard breathe all night,
sigh through the water of sleep
with vestigal gills …

A pair of dragonflies drifted past us, silent,
while higher up two bullet-shaped jets
dragged their roars behind them
on unbreakable chains. It seemed a pity
we’d given up the sky to them, but I understand so little.
Perhaps it was necessary.

All our years together—
and not just together. Surely by now
we have the same blood type, the same myopia.
Sometimes I think we’re the same sex,
the one in the middle of man and woman,
born of both as every child is.
The waves came to us, one each heartbeat,
and lay themselves at our feet.
The swelling goes down.
The fever cools.
There, where the Hartleys grew lettuce eighty years ago
bear and beaver, fox and partridge
den and nest and hunt
and are hunted. I wish I had the means
to give all the north back to itself, to let the pines
rise in the hayfield and the lilacs go wild.
But then where would we live?

I wanted that hour with you all winter—
I thought of it while I worked,
before I slept and when I woke,
a time when the tangled would straighten,
when contrition would become benediction:
the positive hour, shining like mica.
At last the wind brought it to us across the pond,
then took it up again, every last minute.

The Mind Body Problem by Katha Pollitt

Katha Pollitt is an acclaimed essayist. Her writing in the Nation defines for many women how we feel about ourselves in regards to abortion and other feminist issues. Her poetry is prized because it is rare. Publication of a new book, her first in 25 years, is cause for celebration. Here is the beginning of a poem:

Lives of the Nineteenth Century Poetesses

As girls they were awkward and peculiar,
wept in church or refused to go at all.
Their mothers saw right away that no man would marry them.
So they must live at the sufferance of others,
timid and queer as governesses out of Chekhov,
malnourished on theology, boiled eggs, and tea,
but given to outbursts of pride that embarrassed everyone.

Katha Pollitt speaks for me, and for so many other women who feel underrepresented, or unnoticed, not that she carries a political banner in her poetry. In fact, she is very careful about her politics, and almost apologizes about it in a touching poem for her daughter. But she cannot help but demonstrate her bracing intelligence, and her wit, which are most welcome.

Marie Ponsot workshop at Poets House, February 27 and 28

Marie Ponsot

Day one.  

We write "running dragons" with each other.  This is a form Ponsot learned in Beijing.

Alternating stanzas of three lines, then two lines.

Choose one word in the last line of the previous stanza to repeat in the first line of the following stanza.  Begin poem with a location, or non-human subject.  Continue to write stanzas without a person in mind or implied, until after at least three stanzas.  Once you do introduce a person, you finish poem with the same number of stanzas you wrote before the person appears.  The last stanza introduces the idea of spring, either explicitly or implied.

Here is mine.

Day after day of rain. The mushrooms bloomed.

Nearby, the Indian pipes had penetrated

the leafy carpet from last year's autumn.

Their vertical stems formed a carpet

over the moss.  Is this what they mean

by a fairy ring?  Is this what they mean

by enchantment, the nodding white heads

attached to vertical white stems.

Impossible to think they're attached

to the seeds buried since spring.

Some things Ponsot said that resonated:

It is essential to be able to write about the non-human. 

Competition and testing are not intellectually respectable.

Learn something by heart every day.

People like to create.

In a crowded life, try Running Dragons (or Dragons Running, the phrase works either way.)

Your world of language is inside somewhere -- you need to get access to it.  Write ten minutes every day.

William Blake said "Without contraries there can be no progression."

"The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."  (from Proverbs from Hell)

(We wrote revisions and takeoffs of these proverbs as an exercise)

Ponsot's mother was a teacher.  Good teachers assign work they cannot fail at.  

The challenge of writing is working from the inner life to the spoken life to the written life.

Question:  What do you think of self publishing?

Answer: It is important to show your work and have someone show you theirs.  

Practice re-writing which is elemental not remedial.  Once in a while you get it first crack.  Mostly it takes handling, like a potter with clay.  Take it into yourself and see if you can say it differently.  Rewriting can be productive.  Go to the strength, or to the bad knot, and unfurl it.  Say it in other words.

Day Two

What is the mystery that makes a poem hit you forcibly in the diaphragm?  Here is a poem that does that.

From Shakespeare's Cymbeline:

Fear no more the heat o' th' sun,

Nor the furious winter's rages;

Thou thy worldly task hast done,

Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.

Golden lads and girls all must

As chimney sweepers come to dust.

Everyone wrote what they thought was meant by truth for the poet.

Another useful technique for poets is to widen the range from the constant I voice to include another person's point of view, either in a dramatic monologue, or as a dialogue, like Stevie Smith's.

Stevie Smith's "The Sea widow"

How fares it with you, Mrs. Cooper, My bride?

Long are the years since you lay by my side.

Do you wish I was back? Do you speak of me, dearest?

I wish you were back for me to hold nearest.

Who then lies nearer, Mrs. Cooper my bride?

A black man comes in with the evening tide.

What is his name? Tell me! How does he dare?

He comes uninvited.  His name is Despair.

----------

Marie Ponsot is a wise woman, a great teacher, and an inspiring poet.  I felt that I was learning even when she wasn't saying anything.   

Walmart Woman

They’re having a perfect woman sale
at the Walmart. She comes in a box
with movable parts
She doesn’t say much
Just yes and you’re right
when you pull the string
She looks good with her make up in place
and doesn’t grow old
She doesn’t make mistakes
or ever lose her temper

Go ahead
Take a ride to the Walmart
They’re selling perfect women there

Inventory

In her drawers
knee socks
thirty t shirts
the one with the pig snout
the one from the St. Anne’s invitational tournament
many with holes
some with their sleeves cut off
pajama bottoms
some with clouds
some with snow banks and Eskimos and polar bears
the two t shirts with Gorey quotes unopened in their plastic wrappers
the pair of corduroy pants she didn’t like
the French linen pants she never wore
the letter she purloined from my records
with the picture of grandpa and George Bush senior
when they were both around 40 and looking
like minor players in a James Bond movie
she really loved James Bond
he was her kind of hero
or was it just that he was mad handsome
and could get things done

The dresses and skirts and shirts and scarves that hung on the rack
I sorted and put in two piles
first the ones to throw away
then the ones to give away--
no I needed three piles--
the ones to keep or give to friends--
now I have four piles-- the ones I will sleep in--

I put the ones to give away in a box--
there are three skirts, two dresses, the pants,
some t shirts and sweaters
and four handbags –
how she loved handbags
the green one that zippered,
the rose patterned clasp.
I open the bag.
Inside is a receipt from the Salvation Army on E. 23 St.
dated October 22, 2005. I decide to go there.
I carry everything to the taxi.

The driver knows of the Salvation Army
on 14th and 26 but I want to go to the one where she was.

It is the day after Thanksgiving, black Friday
they call it.

The traffic is heavy at 23rd St.
I see her ghost at the Gap,
on the corner of the Old Navy store
where we fought over what she wanted to buy
versus what I wanted to pay for.

I suddenly become very hot and pull off my coat, my scarf,
the sweater I knit her so hot like a flash fever.

The driver says where is it?
as we pass the Good Will;
I think I could just go there,
but no --I want to go where she went and then I see it,
the red outline of a kettle and I say to the driver here it is.
You can stop here.

I pull my clothes back on and pay him. In the door are a few clothes racks
with nothing of interest and a sign saying -- more downstairs.
Someone takes my box-- I have folded the flaps
but it bulges, the last dress I put in shows through--
a red and blue 80s power dress with a gold belt--
is suddenly not hers anymore--
it’s just some discarded stuff --
something she would have trolled for --
that little flash of color showing through the box
like Rosebud in Citizen Kane’s basement -- fades away.
The meaning changes once it is out of her room.
It can mean nothing now.

Lucille Clifton at Uptown Y

Lucille Clifton read poems from her new book, Voices. She talked about the importance of naming and knowing our own names.
We hear from the man on the cover of the Cream of Wheat box, Aunt Jemima, and Uncle Ben. What if they all took a walk together?





Cream of Wheat

sometimes at night
we stroll the market aisles
ben and jemima and me they
walk in front remembering this and that
i lag behind
trying to remove my chefs cap
wondering about what ever pictured me
then left me personless
Rastus
i read in an old paper
i was called rastus
but no mother ever
gave that to her son toward dawn
we return to our shelves
our boxes ben and jemima and me
we pose and smile i simmer what
is my name









from Voices by Lucille Clifton

Thoughts in Autumn

The leaves collapsed into clusters
of russet, orange, and red darkening into brown
I learned to call maroon when I was ten,
and driving with my family in our car
to look at leaves and buy some apples
and dusky concord grapes that grow in the Finger Lakes,
our Umbria, our Grassmere, our nirvana of New York State.
It's one thing to go to school, your pencils new,
your shoes unscuffed and shiny,
it's another to see your children leave the house
and return you know not when

Expectations of Adulthood

The wool uniform, even in summer,
the knee socks and emblem on the weskit
set us apart from the children
in public school who could wear jumpers
or leotards or whatever their mothers chose.
Sometimes we played baseball near the grotto,
the statue of the Virgin always close,
or mimicked the speech of our parents.
Nixon versus Kennedy, differences arose.
Sister Mario taught music, urged us to use
soap not shampoo when washing our hair.
We mustn’t smell too good. Shampoo
makes you vain, her dark eyebrows scolded,
the only bit of hair not hidden by her wimple.

I would be a god.
I would be perfect,
and when I died
they would build a shrine.
I would run the bases
every single time.

In the painting at my grandmother’s house,
the cardinal in red biretta, the parrot squawking
through his study, the skull on the desk,
seemed to give the solution
and the solution was art.

I would find the reasons
behind every single lie.
I would win a prize.
I would never die.

I Used to Think

I used to think when people died their images would fade,
their color pictures change to black and white then grey,
their spirits hover like the light at nightfall.
After his fatal heart attack, I felt Walter tethered
to the earth, revolving like a moon in orbit
or were we revolving around him
who felt alone out there?
But when you died I saw nothing.
The sun eclipsed, the moon
went dark, and an absence grew
so vast a continent appeared where I now live.

I wrote this poem right after September 11, but thought I would post it today,
because George W. Bush was scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention.

I Dream of George W.

In Egypt at the foot of the Sphinx.
Vast expanse of desert and dunes.
In the far distance, office towers,
the skyline of some city of over a million.
As I move along with my tour group,
a projectile whistles past my ear.
The skyscrapers vanish, and in their place,
a mushroom cloud and flames.
Another explosion flattens the rest of the city.
Nothing is left. Holy shit. Holy shit.

Later. another dream.

George W. Bush has come for dinner.
He will only eat a certain kind of potato
and when I fix it he winks at me.
I feel like France during the second world war.
Mostly I want to eat drink and be merry,
might take up cigarettes again to help me face the firing squad.
Will I be killed for something the military
did over which I had no control?
How many more Iraquis will die for something
in my name? Will today be the last day
of my life?

I Want To Swim To Work

If you could see the way I go to work,
descending down the tunnel like a drone,
then later huddled on the bus with jerks
who broadcast when they’re on the phone,
you’d know I don’t exactly want to shirk
my duty as to be alone.
Deep down I am a country girl at heart.
Mass transit was a challenge from the start.


In Syracuse, where I grew up upstate,
my transportation usually meant the bus.
Let’s say your curtain’s set to rise at eight,
when evening schedules slow to a crawl,
and you cannot risk coming late.
With no subways, trolleys or vespas,
the only way to get from here to there
meant filling up the tank to drive the car.

In Manhattan, I learned to take the train
and not to land in Brooklyn by mistake.
My entry level job was to retain
what customers we had who bellyached.
The sample issue of the magazine
was something they refused to pay or take.
We signed the cards with names completely sham:
Yours sincerely, Virginia Cunningham.

(In the backseat of a cab suddenly you are
stuck on the upholstery of an idling car--stuck in a bottleneck)

I love my three speed bike. Weaving at noon
between the cabs, leaving them in my wake,
I speed downhill outside the tunnel traffic.
Just now, I pedaled to the market
where I bought leeks, potatoes, melons
then onto the butcher, the library, all done.

Swimming downstream in rivers takes
less muscle than swimming in a pool.
My arms and legs stretch out like superman's,
then coast, my torso thin and high and tense
to keep from bumping into rocks that jut
and but my shins in shallow water. I swim
in as little as a thimble of water when I get into the groove.

But since the Hudson's all upstream,
and the East River filled with toxins,
between my house and where I work
I will go on taking the train,
then boarding the bus, or fetching a cab
or riding my bike, ending always as
a pedestrian, crossing the light
on the green while I dream
of the river that lets me swim downstream.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/zoom-in-tight/2724208943/

New Poet Laureate Named: Kay Ryan

Watch her and read more about her and by her
Library of Congress Announcement

Death by Fruit Kay Ryan Only the crudest of the vanitas set ever thought you had to get a skull into the picture whether you needed its tallowy color near the grapes or not. Others, stopping to consider shapes and textures, often discovered that eggs or aubergines went better, or leeks, or a plate of string beans. A skull is so dominant. It takes so much bunched up drapery, such a ponderous display of ornate cutlery, just to make it less prominent. The greatest masters preferred the subtlest vanitas, modestly trusting to fruit baskets to whisper ashes to ashes, relying on the poignant exactness of oranges to release like a citrus mist the always fresh fact of how hard we resist how briefly we’re pleased.
1 August 2000 ©2003 Partisan Review Inc.