Archive for the ‘poems’ Category
NaPoMo (n+4): an occasional satire
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: Conrad Black, National Poetry Month, poetry, Rex Murphy, The National Post, Wiliam Butler Yeats
Comments (4) First Night in Toronto
In the Royal York’s Library Bar next table
the retired scholar with wife and two old friends
from New York discussing Trump quotes Yeats
What rough beast… In our hotel room
the front page of the complimentary copy
of The National Post features a full-page, colour ad
for Mizrahi Developments’ luxury condo tower project,
a column by Lord Conrad Black The inability to lead
on pipelines will be the Prime Minister’s ruin…
We will find out soon enough if climate is changing…
In another Rex Murphy sings back up with thesaurus.
NaPoMo (n+3): a clarification
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, National Poetry Month, poetry
Comments (2) The two or three poems inspired yesterday by a Guardian interview with social scientist Mayer Hillman (see the two previous posts), also prompted one reader to comment on the poems, two of which use Mayer’s own words expressing the sentiment that, given civilization is doomed, we’d be better to attend other, more pleasant matters, such as music, love, education, and happiness.
The comment inadvertently touched on the issue of the truth of poetry and the poet’s relation to the thoughts expressed by the words of the poem, that yesterday’s three, impromptu poems might suggest some agreement with Hillman’s gloom and prescriptions.
Five years back mulling over the same matter I composed an ironic indictment, which, 
after some little fiddling this morning, turned out, spontaneously, to be the fourteen-line poem that follows. Whether it provides any clarification as to my own stance on the issue, I leave to the reader.
Chance Sonnet:
“BE IT RESOLVED…”
BE IT RESOLVED that
whereas public officials
who deny the reality
of Anthropogenic Climate Change
and hinder efforts to mitigate
its destructive effects present
a clear and present danger
to themselves and others,
said public officials should be
removed from office forthwith
and placed under a physician’s care
until such time as their suicidal
and/or homocidal and/or ecocidal
tendencies cease to present.
NaPoMo (n+2): Two for Mayer Hillman
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, Mayer Hillman, National Poetry Month, poetry
Comments (6) Two for Mayer Hillman
1.
So much depends
upon
fossil fuels except
music,
love, education, and
happiness.
Focus on these
things.
2.
Asked what he would do were the world to end
next day, Luther replied, “Plant an apple tree.”
NaPoMo (n): a serendipitous poem
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: climate change, Mayer Hillman, National Poetry Month, poetry, Shawn Bell
Comments (2) Combing through with no small pleasure the Seculum trilogy of Peter Dale Scott, 
preparing a talk I’m to give at a humanities conference at the end of May, I wound up at the same time in a short Facebook thread back and forth with a teaching colleague, which inspires the improvised poem, dedicated to him, below:
So many aspects of life
For Shawn Bell, composer
We read the same Guardian article
this morning, though you chose to share it.
Mayer Hillman, 86: We’re doomed
…making a case for [re?]cycling…
is almost irrelevant. We’ve got to stop
burning fossil fuels. I commented
you’d forgotten his most important words:
Standing in the way is capitalism
Your reply in its current form
and though I am not unacquainted
with Isaiah’s singing the lion shall lie down
with the lamb and I’m the first
to remark the confusion of first
and second nature in Adorno’s
If the lion had a consciousness
his rage at the antelope he wants
to eat would be ideology
I answered The dream of postwar
social democracy that capitalism
could be tamed by the rule of law
is as realistic as thinking
a lion can be trained to be vegan
And though we continued twisting into
that thread strands of current models
of socio-economic organization
in particular capitalism and socialism
big data and AI
The Communist Hypothesis
and the Enlightenment’s faith
in its overcoming its own
fateful dialectic Hillman’s words
free of the snarl
of our disagreement
need here be repeated
So many aspects of life
depend on fossil fuels
except for music
and love and education
and happiness. These things
we must focus on.
NoPoMo 2018 (4): something cheeky
Filed under: poems | Tags: March End Prill, National Poetry Month, poetry
Comments (1) 
she was coming for supper
he sliced two fresh avocado
egg yolk lemon wedge squeeze dribble
& dill then olive oil drizzled in & whisked
sauced over slices fanned out
over one side of the plate the other
halved boiled little new pink potatoes
tossed in chopped purple onion
grape seed oil red wine vinegar
& a tsp Dijon
the main dish cubed pears
eggplant Szechwan marinated firm tofu
chopped celery & ground ginger
sautéed in olive oil with a drop of sesame
dripped in for a hint of the Orient
a big bottle of Uncle Ben’s
Sweet Soy Sauce dumped on
all served on Shanghai noodles
he wore his nicest apron
but no pants having plucked
each fine wiry glossy black hair
from around his anus washed
oiled & perfumed so its folds
and puckers glistened in the candlelight
From March End Prill (Book*hug, 2011)
NoPoMo 2018 (3): A Post-secular poem avant le lettre
Filed under: poems | Tags: March End Prill, National Poetry Month, poetry, post secular
Leave a comment Lift the flame
Luciferous hissing
blue out the lighter
Light the incens
uous resins
crackle in the bowl
Father
Son &
Holy Ghost
Each cardinal direction
dawn morning sun
in branches
orientation
sinister
Southern Cross
Antepod
Abendland
Ol’ Rope-a
accidental occident
all that’s left’s
True North
“I believe”
Lichen yellows
Shady bark
From (Book*hug, 2011)
NaPoMo 2018 (2)
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: Matthew J Trafford, National Poetry Month, poetry
Comments (1) A poem from Ladonian Magnitudes, one of the favourites of its most inspired reviewer, 
Matthew J. Trafford.
I HATE POETRY
I hate poetry readings polite in bookstores or schools or café bar open mics
every year’s unreadable thousands of slim volumes of verse inane formulaic inoffensive backcover blurbs filed filling booksupermarket-bookshelf ghettoes
poetry journals quarterlies annuals reviews anthologies handymuseums artcrypts a magazine (sb. 5. b.) should be a magazine (sb. Mil.)
I hate Spoken Word Slam poetry uniform monotonous Pop music spectacle theatrics
old faux Boho poetry yeasty anecdotes Al Purdy dumping a mug of beer on Margaret Atwood’s head for being too academic
antiAcademic Poetry poet poetry professors
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets sniggering at mainstream poets other L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets over their own writing “innovative” as Industry dumping a number of a local periodical with a bad review in San Francisco Bay
I hate Work Street Regional Peoples New Formalist National Minority poetry
I hate creative writing program workshop voice polish
poetry in complete correctly grammatical punctuated sentences
lines and stanzas typographically regular miming lyric epic voice strophes
poetry preciously le mot juste metaphoric gridding universals of human experience
personae all the poet’s voice nothing anybody’d think or say
Hear a live performance: from States of the Arts Conference, Saarbrücken, Germany, 23 October 2008.
NaPoMo 2018
Filed under: poems, The Brouillon | Tags: haiku, National Poetry Month, Nustrat Fateh Ali Khan, poetry, rumi, Rupi Kaur
Leave a comment Back to the Skunkworks!
Filed under: poems | Tags: Carl Jung, flying saucers, mythology, poetry, ufology, UFOs
Leave a comment Just last week, a friend recently publicized a chapbook of mine composed and published 
over twenty years ago, and the response, livelier than any to any of my work in recent memory, encourages me to return to the work that chapbook began.
I shouldn’t be surprised, in a way. This poem was the center-piece of the performances I gave during a tour of Germany in 1996, and then, too, the response was gratifying: one audience member excitedly came up to me to say he would buy everything I would publish, and a friend I made during that tour, the German novelist Georg Oswald, approved with pleasure the approach I took to the material. And a few years later this sequence was well-received by Terry Matheson, a professor of English who has applied narratology to alien abduction reports and who was kind enough to even teach the poem below in one of his classes.
So, for interested parties, I append one of the first poems from this project, the last poem of my first trade edition, Grand Gnostic Central and other poems. and return to back-engineering this “modern myth of things seen in the sky”.
Flying Saucers
Tuesday three in the afternoon 24 June 1947
Kenneth Arnold of Boise, rescue pilot, businessman, deputy sheriff and federal marshal, U.S. Forest Serviceman
At 9,000 feet crystal-clear conditions
Alone in his Callair between Chehalis and Yakima
An hour’s detour searching for a lost transport
Out of the blue a flash like just before a midair crash
Made him look left north of Mount Rainier
To see at ninety degrees
Nine seeming jet planes in a V pointed south
The echelon vaguely bobbing and weaving
Flashing reflections
Twenty-four miles off
Against Rainier’s snows, tailless—
Flying nearly forty miles
Between Mounts Rainier and Adams
Three times the speed of sound
The first crossed the ridge bridging the mountains
As the last came over its north crest five miles back
Nine crescents needing to be
Half a mile long to be seen
Flying that fast that far away
So smooth mirroring sunlight
Like speedboats on rough water
Wavering in formation
Like the tail of a Chinese kite
Wings tipping flashing blue white
Each like a saucer skipped over water
For the Record: “Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger”
Filed under: poems | Tags: innovative poetry, intertextuality, Louis Dudek, poetic form, poetry
Comments (2) One of the ironic aspects of the digitization of cultural artefacts and the blissfully ignorant acceptance if not celebration of this process is, apart from those documents excluded from the process in the first place, the inevitable decay of links and websites and the consequent disappearance of the works they hosted. Such was the case with the poem below.
When Louis Dudek’s penultimate volume of poetry The Caged Tiger was published, I read 
it with some irritation and sought a way to express it other than in a review. The compositional answer was to write poems that intervened in the original, engaging in a kind of dialogue; the relation of the new poem to the original is underlined in [28], below. The words in bold are Dudek’s; the numbers in [] are the page numbers of his original book.
The novelty or singularity of this formal maneuver to contemporaneous and subsequent compositional practice I leave to the determination of the learning of the reader; the poem was written the year of the publication of Dudek’s volume, 1997.
Reading Dudek’s The Caged Tiger
[10]
The transcendental then is merely the unknown
—No: how what’s known is—
inside out: no silhouette
no eidos no idea:
The transcendental’s how you know
you’re facing the mirror
…
Aside from yourself
the world
things
How it all happened
to come
together
‘s beyond you
…
Neither this nor any mystery’s gnawed
The mystic’s “the tight-lipped”
Tongue’s quiver locked up
[3]
Art is a dead god’s tongue
whose words
we still like the sound of
“the music of the spheres”
night’s white noise
the whole spectrum
of electromagnetic radiation
visible and audible
only to the radio-telescopes’
timpani tipped to listen
idle humming
“I-am-I”’s sound poem
[8]
Time’s transcendental
A watch
[15]
As one of those
in downy feathers
mouth open
happened on
spring mornings
[39]
in the cage too tight to lie in
a small pot nobody empties
wire mesh hardly a reach up
nights icy rain
days the sun throbs
the face in the cool mud
[28]
The bass beat faster than a raver’s heart at daybreak
shudders the whole body in the spot and strobelit dark
College boys and girls in their personal fashion statements
each writhe alone in cigarette smoke fog and pheremones
[99]
The old are removed
to their graves
and the young come up
to fill their places
i.e., as a “[f]ine bod”y
closed in a dipping casket
Old Heracleitus
renewed every sun
Poeta Doctus 