Expansion Ex. 9-23-10 Week 7

A single pair of hands gone metronome directs a smattering of primaries. Reds, blues, and yellows tuned to a surgical precision. The brass quakes and wheezes in the sweltering heat, etched into the matted grass canvas wrapped in barbed wire. Lost in their drone, the brick simmers against my shoulders. Their footfalls thumping my chest, I watch as they watch me, wondering what I'm doing. Understand them and their guttural chorus? No. I'm thinking of you, remembering your flat above the grocery on that London street that I'll never see again. You, creeping down the back stairs for chocolate and cigarettes in bare feet and the midnight of my t-shirt. I smiled at your fascination with America, the land of the free and grease wrapped in wax paper underneath the buzzing of that cracked halo. I remember stumbling up those very steps, heavy with Newcastle, your cricket bat in my hand. The haft worn slim and wrapped in orange electrical tape. Your heels clicking behind me, leaving swatches of grass along the baseboard. Your fingers sunk into the small of my back, guiding my rubber knees up to the landing. I told you that you sounded like Julie Andrews and asked you if you fancied a spot 'o tea. You kissed me, labeled me drunk, and loosed the steam, emerging thirty minutes later with my love for you nailed down alongside those aching wooden boards. I wonder sometimes, if it's still there, rising with the heat on those soaked February mornings, warm against the husband and wife who quiver, lost in their eyelids, in the fish-eye lens twilight.    

Calisthenic 9-23-10 Week 7

Emo Poetry Redux

My heart aches, circled with barbed wire.
A black river of tears streaming down my face.
Each breathe, like inhaling glass.
Why don't you love me?
My soul teeters on the dismal abyss.
My flesh grows cold because you're not here.
My blood turns to ash and I die.

Buzzwords: Garbageman, Mime, Doctor, Chef, France, Spain, Ibiza

Redux:

July 14, 1972

Propped against Bordeaux, trashcans
swallow vintaged industry left to molder
against gnarled rinds of aigues and graves.
My ears blister, left feverpink.
A tragic frown drips
over my apron's crisp white. 
My hushed but snarling "Mon Dieu!"
echoes across cobbled history.
The lamb grows chill,
quivering in its greasy fête.
Wallets, slurring and happy
in their bistro chairs
turn listless in
the scented 8 o'clock heat.

Sign Analysis 9-18-10 Week 6

Robert Lowell
"Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket"

• subverts traditional elegy 
• poem appears to "pull reader along." possible textualization of sea currents? 
• extensive use of Germanic monosyllables. piece appears to fold in on itself...evidence of more textual "acting" ?
• line 12: "weight the body [...]return..." keeps tradition of burying dead at sea--entrance of monstrous with death, esp. violent death
• embodying Night with nautical terms and therefore human qualities. 
• numerous invocation of Greek pantheon and mythos? How does this stack against a Quaker, definitively Christian context?
• line 35. "sea trembles at your death". Notion of fear in death? Is death then a separate agent, which renders the sea vulnerable?
• line 36: "lash" As if the sea can be tied down. Can it be tied down? What does this say in relation to the Man v. Nature concept?
• line 39: Why do we have this question mark here? what is implied with the punctuation here? Can bluefish even be caught? Potential sarcasm loaded into this question mark?
• line 50: Guns cradled on the tide....poem shifts if only for a moment to its traditional association as a repository. Yet the sea cradles violence. What do we we do with this?
• Continuous allusions to _Moby Dick_ throughout. Why? Is this a potential sign of college educated youth, or something more?

More will follow shortly....

Free Post 9-17-10 Week 6

Paolo

"O anime affanate, venite a noi parlar, s'altri nol niega!"

O battered souls, if One does  not forbid it, speak with us!"

(Dante's Inferno, Canto 5)

-----------------------------------

I feel her hands snap shut, 

the feel of quaking steel. 

No longer my own, her hips twist. 

Her arms pull me into plummet. 

My shoulders snarl against 

the vapor stone of her palms.

My head stitched to her hollow chest.

I leave my words with you, Poeta. 

I follow her in this, our waltz,

as the sulfur aches between us. 

Expansion 9-16-10 Week 6

Draft taken from Free Post from week 5.

 "Scattered"

"Do not lean on the glass."
"Feel the hand stitched moccasins."
"Roll genuine arrowheads in your palms."
"Hear the aged war chants."
I remember when I first met you.
You smiled at me. Your face streaked
with paint, tinged with dormant November.
You stand in front of me, caught in mid-stride.
Steel rods nuzzled inside your calves.
The baked clay in your arm gone wishing well,
heavy with tourist's pennies.
The small plaque with its burnt copper script
calls you Grateful Hawk: proud member of the
Anasazi Nation. I call you Shannon and consider
what you've lost in the Las Vegas heat.

Pedagogy Post 9/15/10 Week 5

I spent a fair amount of time last night discussing with a friend of mine what it is that "makes" one a poet, or what "constitutes" a poet. The conversation remained rather interesting given that my friend isn't currently engaged in Academia/scholarship etc. on a continual every day basis like all of us are for instance. With this in mind, it made sense to me that my friend referred to me as a poet, claiming that I have "the way with words." In my personal opinion, I am a very far cry from a poet. I consider myself to be someone who is simply learning all the tools that a poet might use. More like whipping up a home-cooked meal is a far cry from a 5-star chef. But, back to my original point: What is it that makes someone a poet?  One might make the argument that a person inherits the title of poet once they have some piece of work published in some format or another. To complicate this idea further one might make the argument that a poet "earns their stripes" by gut checking their way through a creative thesis track or an MFA program, spending their time, nose to the grind and so on. As a counter to this idea I'm forced to remember and consider poets such as Emily Dickinson given that all of her work was published posthumously.  So basically what I'm left with...I still have no working definition of what constitutes a poet, but I can be sure that this definition must remain in flux along with the various Zeitgeists that we encounter. What does everyone else think?

Free Post Expansion Ex. 9/14/10 Week 5

I remember when I first met you in that dormant November oven of Las Vegas heat, construction paper feathers snagging your strawberry blonde. The red finger paint of war dashed your pale cheeks. You smiled at me, offering your traditional "How!", loosing a flurry of giggles from your tribe of eight year olds. The name tag hugging your rusted orange blouse reveals your Indian name as Troupe Leader: Grateful Hawk, but I just call you Shannon. Hours later, propped against Moroccan floor cushions, the hookah simmering between us, I slip the red plastic frames from your temples, revealing hazel eyes tinged a burnt copper in the hazed dark. I breathe on the glass, wiping away smudges of war paint with the black linen table cloth. You wrest the toes of your machine stitched moccasin flats into the supple Persian imitation rug, our feet twisting, vying for position.


Will continue later...