Links for breakfast

This interview with Mary Howe, and where I got said link.

red onion, cherries, boiling potatoes, milk- by Jane Hirshfield

Here is a soul, accepting nothing.
Obstinate as a small child
refusing tapioca, peaches, toast.

The cheeks are streaked, but dry.
The mouth is firmly closed in both directions.

Ask, if you like,
if it's merely sulking, or holding out for better.
The soup grows cold in the question.
The ice cream pools in its dish.

Not this, is all it knows. Not this.
As certain cut flowers refuse to drink in the vase.

And the heart, from its great distance, watches, helpless.

-----

Now this reminded me of myself today.

David Orr on the "Poetry of Parenthood"

And I say: Hooray for this.

Thoughts for breakfast

Woke up thinking that I haven't started writing poetry yet, that everything that had gone before, everything that I had written thus far (and especially of late) are only finger exercises: How does one cut a line? What does one do with metaphor? How does one manipulate syntax? Voice? Play with a multitude of voices? With points of view?

And I felt this a beautiful, liberating thing: The thought that I had never before written poetry, the feeling that it is possible that the true poems will come, and that they are coming soon (hopefully; parang sine).

I suppose I always knew this, which is why I am putting myself through school at this stage in my life--school, being, not an institution, but the time and space to listen and read and think, to consider the thoughts of those who have gone before you, and those with whom you find yourself on this, well, journey.

Likewise, I think I now see how much more can be demanded from fiction, and what needs to be done to create not just stories, but great stories--none of which I have been able to do as yet. (Hopefully, I persevere and learn enough to do just that one day.)

And that, too, is a wonderful realization. 

To be at the beginning, and knowing this. To be at the beginning and finally getting a view of what you're up against. 

To be ready, at last, to begin, without ever having stop the writing that has been and is already taking place.

In other words: I am such a nerd.

Books for Breakfast

The Complete Poems, Wallace Stevens

------

Occasioned by Jimmy Abad's recitation of The Snowman in class. Beautiful poem. He used it to segue into how one ought to write a lyric poem following through from an idea. It is alright to write about ideas, he said, but what one ought to do is to make sure that the idea carries the weight of the physical world, which becomes the details that push the argument one is making.

I thought this would interest evaluna, whose poems tend toward this, I think, as much as it interested me.

Poems for Breakfast

Good morning.


Sonnet, by Robert Hass

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.
He has loved her voice and listens with attention
to every modulation of its tone. Knowing
it intimately. Not knowing what he wants
from the sound of it, from the tendered civility.
He studies, out the window, the seed shapes
of the broken pods of ornamental trees.
The kind that grow in everyone's garden, that no one
but horticulturalists can name. Four arched chambers
of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,
a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.
A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,
lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,
patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

The Gospel According to the Blind Man, by Marie La Viña

“I see people looking like trees and walking,” said the blind man,
after Jesus touched him the first time. 
What he said baffled even the human god.
“They are walking around with arms outstretched,” he said.
“Their palms brush the sky. The stars slip through their long fingers. 
The moonlight spills into a river and darts away like a school of silver fish
while the leaves moan in the trees in a hundred human voices. 
Branches argue with wind. Locusts buzz in the night’s tangled hair.”
He asked in wonder, “Is this the world?” 
Then the god lifted his holy palms, wet with spit,
and held them over the man’s eyes. 
Twice touched by him, the man muttered, “Wait.” 
But already he was healed.

Poem (External Scene), by Dan Beachy-Quick

The field blank in snow. But I mean this page.
Now print mars the surface to make surface
Seen. Sheen only error brings. Perfect rage
So the sun rises. Rage is your slow practice
That makes of every day another day
In whose gathering promise the shy sparrows
Shiver instead of sing. I want to go away.
See these footsteps? These black shapes in the snow?
If there is a word for them, it’s no word
I know. Pursuit?, no. Proof?, no. Don’t call it fear.
Could I cross this white sheet if I were coward,
Edge to edge, margin to margin, never
Referring to anything outside itself?—
Stop that. Stop pointing to the photo on the shelf.

Men at Forty, by Donald Justice

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

"Towards a conceptual lyric"

Adam David posted this link on Facebook. 

It's one of those things that interests, while simultaneously frightening and depressing, me.

Having a long think about it; and surreptitiously looking for the materials mentioned in the article. 

:P

Inventing a Horse, by Meghan O'Rourke

Inventing a horse is not easy.

One must not only think of the horse.

One must dig fence posts around him.

One must include a place where horses like to live;

or do when they live with humans like you.

Slowly, you must walk him in the cold;

feed him bran mash, apples;

accustom him to the harness;

holding in mind even when you are tired

harnesses and tack cloths and saddle oil

to keep the saddle clean as a face in the sun;

one must imagine teaching him to run

among the knuckles of tree roots,

not to be skittish at first sight of timber wolves,

and not to grow thin in the city,

where at some point you will have to live;

and one must imagine the absence of money.

Most of all though: the living weight,

the sound of his feet on the needles,

and, since he is heavy, and real,

and sometimes tired after a run

down the river with a light whip at his side,

one must imagine love

in the mind that does not know love,

an animal mind, a love that does not depend

on your image of it,

your understanding of it;

indifferent to all that it lacks:

a muzzle and two black eyes

looking the day away, a field empty

of everything but witch grass, fluent trees,

and some piles of hay.

The Plain Sense of Things by Wallace Stevens

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.