June 24, 2013

Middle-Aged by Ezra Pound

A STUDY IN AN EMOTION

"'Tis but a vague, invarious delight.

As gold that rains about some buried king.

As the fine flakes,

When tourists frolicking

Stamp on his roof or in the glazing light

Try photographs, wolf down their ale and cakes

And start to inspect some further pyramid;

As the fine dust, in the hid cell beneath

Their transitory step and merriment,

Drifts through the air, and the sarcophagus

Gains yet another crust

Of useless riches for the occupant,

So I, the fires that lit once dreams

Now over and spent,

Lie dead within four walls

And so now love

Rains down and so enriches some stiff case,

And strews a mind with precious metaphors,

And so the space

Of my still consciousness

Is full of gilded snow,

The which, no cat has eyes enough

To see the brightness of."

Cat Eyes painting by Jody Domingue

i've often heard people argue that good or great poetry can only be written by the young. ironically, those arguments were usually made by middle-aged & older poets. i felt in my gut that wasn't true, or i didn't want it to be true, or that it was useless to believe it even if it was true. should i just give up because i'm too old to write good or great poetry? i do think there are certain types of poems that i may no longer be able to write as well as i might have when i was younger, such as poems evoking the experience of falling in love? and i've never been much of a conceptual poet either, so at least i have that going for me, except conceptual poetry has been the fad. i guess i would rather be indifferent to peaking, whenever it happens, if it hasn't already. i write because i have to. i'm an amateur and this isn't a career for me, as it is for so many nowadays. there was a scene in the spalding gray documentary that came out a couple of years ago in which someone who knew him described the arc of his life & career, which were inextricably twined, as the gradual opening of a deeply self-absorbed man as he began to report his encounters with the world. that resonated with me, as it probably describes me as well, as i have gradually allowed more & more of the world to be encountered after shunning it for so long after my traumatically abusive childhood. lately, i've been practicing being present when i do my cashier shifts. i practice feeling my body, feeling the floor through my feet, opening my chest, and hardest of all for me, making eye contact. with each transaction, however it goes, i wish everyone, as best as i can, to have a good day. this has become a practice of accepting the flavor of each interaction, which is challenging when people are weird or stressed or unpleasant. what i've been noticing lately is how this practice is bleeding into everything i do, including my writing, which has become a record of each moment's opening. in this way, i am a lens, catching light. in this way, i am a mic, catching sound.

The difference in the life cycles of conceptual and experimental poets is no mere numbers game, but stems from basic differences in the nature of their art. Conceptual poets are brash, iconoclastic, and often transgressive, and are generally at their best before they become constrained by established habits of thought. In contrast, the greatest achievements of experimental poets depend on deep knowledge of their subjects and subtle mastery of language and style. Robert Frost believed that a poem "begins in delight and ends in wisdom." He contended that poets need a kind of knowledge that cannot be gained solely in libraries, or acquired deliberately, but comprises "what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields." Randall Jarrell explained that Frost's greatest poems "come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that was, sometimes with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech."

Do Poets Peak Young? Don't Believe It
David Galenson Professor of Economics, University of Chicago

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-galenson/do-poets-peak-young-dont_b_3187028.html

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

June 18, 2013

neurodiversity

aaammm iiiiii?????? aaammm iiiiii?????? aaammm iiiiii?????? aaammm iiiiii??????

of the spire

of
the
spire
of the Tower
Theatre in
Fresno
California

of
the
spire
of the Tower
Theatre in
Fresno
California

of
the
spire
of the Tower
Theatre in
Fresno
California

photo by david prasad

binaural bloomsday!

kinda/sorta the whole Ulysses read in one hour on one lawn!

"This Bloomsday we release the complete audio recording of the reading, made in beautiful binaural sound by Derek Ecklund, who wandered around during the event wearing a special dual microphone setup. To get the full effect, listen on headphones."
http://thelatenow.tumblr.com/post/53163714770/bloomsday-to-your-ears

for more pictures of this event:
http://pdxart.blogspot.com/2012/06/pdx-art-james-joyce-bloomsday-late-now.html

Maurice Nadeau (1911-2013)

http://htmlgiant.com/random/intro-to-the-avant-garde-a-secondary-materials-primer/

jalil shahnaz tar player

Painting from Hasht-Behesht palace, Isfahan, Iran, 1669

June 16, 2013

posture of calling

AP Photo/Roberto Candia

standing on the lip of the curb as if poised to dive into that carless curve of tar, darker, darker, darker into dark like a crow landing upon a fading bruise, his short sleeved shirt is black, hunched in front of the backwards stenciled letters are cursive behind his back, what the feminine fails to spell he cannot face and what he cannot face has curved him toward a question as he stands there clasping a silver phone to his ear as if listening might fail, the bees, the bees. bent there on the sidewalk where few answers are found like a homeless man hoping a stray dollar could change his world, wearing flipflops & shorts like a diver with second thoughts, receiving last minute instruction from god, the most useless coach. beside him there is an elm tree whose ancient rivulets of bark flow like the slowest, most inexorable mudslide. he could be saved along that curve, lined with trees heavy with green, listening for what light escapes those greedy fists clenched above them, leaning all together toward the hard bruise, the evidence of abuse they are circled around, choking on the accumulated ash of an overcast morning, the death of all fathers passing into the throbbing blue while the empty brackets await their appointed wheels. the road is empty for entire passages of sobbing solo violin. your eyes accept what silence the city offers as you wonder what news a man could receive on sunday morning that would make him consider such a dive?

June 10, 2013

kim wallows

"when things go wrong, i mean, that sometimes can work out really well if you just really wallow in it going really wrong."

-kim gordon, sonic youth

from lush to lush

woke up remembering when i visited the intentional community called twin oaks after moving away from portland the last time i left. wonder if i will keep repeating this until i die: move to portland to start a new life, or at least experience a different version of myself, write hundreds of poems that almost no one hears or reads, grow frustrated & disenchanted (but how & when did i ever get so enchanted in the first place & when will i learn my lesson?) i spent a week at there learning about the community. one of the founders picked me up at the greyhound terminal. people were surprised as didn't normally do that. i had read her book "is it utopia yet?" and liked her. she was very real & salty, which reminded me of my mom. i was 28. i remember being aware that it was my saturn return, that the planet saturn returning to the position in the sky it was located at the time of my birth, which it does every seven years or so. the 28th year being an especially momentous phase. i remember the lush virginia woods. i remember going for a canoe ride down the james river which flowed nearby, followed by a gregarious irish setter who swam & swam alongside, worrying us. i remember them telling us you could only be naked around the community after nine o'clock. i remember hitting it off with a wizardly, gypsy looking guy from new york, drumming beside a fire in the dark. we were gonna do a spoken word & percussion collaboration for the visitor's talent show at the end of our stay, but his girlfriend broke up with him and he was too despondent to play. i remember waking up everyone in the visitor's cabin with claustrophobic nightmares. i remember applying to become a member of the community, which required each applicant to tell their life story for an hour to a visitor's committee, which was daunting for me because it doesn't take too long before my story enters terrible pain. i woke up wishing i had a recording of that story.

http://www.twinoaks.org/

June 5, 2013

yiddish poetry

Between Two Wars by Kenneth Rexroth

Between Two Wars by Kenneth Rexroth

Remember that breakfast one November —
Cold black grapes smelling faintly
Of the cork they were packed in,
Hard rolls with hot, white flesh,
And thick, honey sweetened chocolate?
And the parties at night; the gin and the tangos?
The torn hair nets, the lost cuff links?
Where have they all gone to,
The beautiful girls, the abandoned hours?
They said we were lost, mad and immoral,
And interfered with the plans of management.
And today, millions and millions, shut alive
In the coffins of circumstance,
Beat on the buried lids,
Huddle in the cellars of ruins, and quarrel
Over their own fragmented flesh.

June 3, 2013

filaments

hanging lamp's wire,

blackened to camouflage

its dangle, collects

dust as the drunken

dusk staggers through

dirty windows, meekly

peeking from behind

sober rhododendron's

purple freckled shoulders

my blues proxy

some skinny kid slumped on a sidewalk's weathered bench, gray to match the sky's usual mood but not today. shaggy inside his baggy black sweatpants & billowing white tshirt cradling a black bagged guitar between his knees as one pale slender arm lazily hoists a harmonica to his pursed lips. i hear him before i see him as i approach the bus stop beside the school of rock. i am tired today & have been all week, but it's not the harmonica that startles me, it's the pang in the moan of his bluesy belting, the tang in his hurtful shout, punctuated by perfunctory hoots of harmonica. i sit down on the gray bench inside the transparent shelter, my posture perfected from sitting on a cushion all afternoon, daylight stolen to search inside my cave. i feel his defiantly poisonous glare on my shoulder and refuse to meet its dark eyed dare as i look past him for a bus that refuses to arrive. trapped inside his practiced howl, i sit there and watch all the people who pass, swiveling their twice startled heads: first by the sound of someone singing & singing really well and then again when they finally locate that source of song and realize it's just some skinny little kid who has perfected the soul of misery.

spokensong

June 24, 2013