No I can never go; it is dark beyond my gate;_______
And my mind could not live out there
(Frank Samperi)
Here are insupportables of life, and suns in a
standoff with dust
unleash the crows on them—just two crows!—
The dark wing, as it's mean
and roguish, (snapt
& torn, too, in the same wind and sun)
is upon them
Mohawks compete with locals
for some fear, too
Do they mean to join us, in the parks?
Wind and the suns
mean no harm, not with all the tents & needles
in a row:
not when sex confects a church, & compels a lot
of Love,
Exudation
Electricity
They mock the Abbé who offers donuts, the greying
politico with fairish jaw
Girls happy to lie sprawled in yurts,
food out of a can,
cold
What's it a question of anyways, money, sex, or bodies
without organs?
Nothing's heavy-handed here! they repeat daily—
Look! just
isolated
yurts,
locals,
girls, cold-bitten
12 comments:
Conrad,
Is this your poem?
Claudia
Hi Claudia
yes, it is. It's my take on the Occupy crowd in Toronto.
& across the street is the Infirmary ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luy1cmbQjBw
this form (of the poem suits you vest and all
(write (me) when you have less time:
K.
Thanks, K
I try to suit 'form' to subject matter, and who better than a couple of crows?
The image of the crows, the girls, something bleeding, bleating. Belted out. Something about to erupt. Stunning.
Thanks, Margot
the striking clarity of your comments, as always, is appreciated.
This opening passage is remarkable, Conrad: it says "un" and "humble" (which I hear in or behind or rising up from "dust", as if asking the dust -- or the dusk inevitably to come, down over everything -- unanswerable questions), and "sun" and then again "suns" in a sequence that un-entangles the poem from something, keeps it standing off, apart in its unsubscription, while also open to any possible lights of setting suns...
(I have been thinking of Wordsworth's "strolling Bedlamites"...)
____
The insupportables of life, and suns in a
standoff with dust,
unleash the crows on them—just two crows!—
The dark wing, as it's mean
and roguish, (snagged
& wrapt, too, in the same wind and sun)
is upon them
Tom,
thanks for verbalizing the intentional curse/benediction ambivalence of the opening "upon them"-wherein lies both the event's and poet's essential undecidability of just what's been happening over there.
The sun-dust alternation is almost intentional, never making it quite 'clear' how to see this thing happening below. As I was saying to Margot yesterday in phone conversation my visceral (political) and poetic responses to Occupy are decidedly at odds. Can the poet unsympathetic to the Canadian Occupy movement write about it? Perhaps the 'crows' is a case of authorial slippage giving me away even in verse: the traditional trope of crows as harbinger or late arrivals at the post-battle feast of corpses (as in "Twa Corbies")
So glad Wordsworth led you to this: he's probably been my number one literary influence.
So glad you read and commented, Tom,
Conrad,
I've been following, and respecting, your several careful expressions of an honest "visceral ambivalence" about these Occupations.
I've now been involved in three of them, and my own cup of visceral ambivalence runneth over.
Something about being a septuagenarian whose skinny posterior is frozen to cold, unyielding pavement at two a.m.-- one really has to think hard and deeply about just what is going on, and just what one's place in it (if any) may be.
Recalling Samuel Johnson's remark that nothing so well concentrates the mind as knowing one is to be hung in the morning.
From the Last Chance Saloon of History, one wobbles out the door into what? Posthistorical utopian dissolution of all artificial social boundaries and barriers -- or Hang 'Em High?
(One thought I have had, though, while respecting and appreciating your appropriate impatience with these protests as viewed from your relatively safe vantage, across the border, in an actually civilised nation -- it's impossible to feel from afar just how low things are among the ragtag outcast vagrant crew on the desperate margins of US urban societies right now. For the most part, the truly underprivileged, disenfranchised, dispossessed and desperate monads of the streets really couldn't care less about what is or isn't resolved by the hundreds of play-house "General Assemblies" that are cropping up across the vast wastelands of freeway, mall and market that presently constitute the hardened-bunker gated-community reality of "this great nation". And that may be unfortunate. But it is also understandable.)
Tom,
I couldn't agree more. It's impossible for me (and probably for most Occupy activists here)to understand the predatory financial climate in America, and the all too certain slide into real poverty, homelessness that results when the American middle class go for the 'dream' bait and then choke on the lure. It's incredible to me above all that a president who'd sloganeered on "Yes, we can!" thinks nothing of bailing out the Wall Street scoundrels who'd perpetrated the subprime mortage meltdown. Who'd failed to see that the Wall Street conspiracy threatened the very self-preservation of the middle class. Yes, from where I'm watching things it seems like "utopian dissolution".
And there really aren't in the States (are there?) the same social safety nets we enjoy here thanks to the likes of Pierre Trudeau and his dream of a "just society" practically written into government policy almost 30 years ago. How fortunate we Canadians are. You and I, though practically neighbours, live in "two solitudes", don't we? I guess I'm saying if I protest with you in Oakland, Washington,Seattle it's because I feel (in my own way) the gnaw of personal degradation & vanishing self-worth that's the direct effect of the abstract institutionalization of everything these days, from religion to civic politics to education. That's a function, in short, of what Marxist theorists Negri and Hardt call the "Empire" of global capital.I could march with you in principle.
But I can't talk about what I haven't experienced: the materiality of the event really does elude me as a Canadian who grew up in the shadow of Trudeau's "just society". My sympathies with American Occupy are academic only, and too generalizable. My objection against Canada's version is that it smacks of ingratitude and almost a wilful (amounting to almost unpatriotic?)denigration of privileges & freedoms we enjoy here because of enlightened "social democratic" principles former governments have turned into living reality.The checks and safeguards, though not totally fail-proof,do shield us from the horrible American realities. Canadians are not Americans though (paradoxically) occuping the same globalized world stage.
And a very good thing it is for Canadians that they are not Americans. One doubts there will ever come a millennial equivalent of the Nuremberg Trials, but all the same, it's not only a terrible experience to be an American (even, or no, especially, a completely disempowered American) in these times, but an even more terrible irony to know that, to the future, to have been an American at all, in these times, is to have been branded with those marks of darkness which "our" "system" and "our" "social structure" have imprinted upon us all.
In my later lifetime I have been serially betrayed by a union (the Service Employees International Union, to put a name to it), to which I had paid 21 consecutive years' biweekly dues; by an employer, holier-than-though in its marketing all those years (and let us, while we're at it, put a name to that, too, New College of California), which, when it collapsed of the weight of its own financial misdeeds, denied me my contractually-stipulated retirement); and by a State Labor Board (of California, since this seems to have degenerated into a game of names), which "approved" a "settlement" "negotiated" in their very offices (on Golden Gate Avenue, in San Francisco, to mark it on a map), yet neglected, as a matter of "policy", to "prosecute" the "settlement", so that I was never able to collect a penny of what was due (to enforce collection, I learned, would require lawyers, and legal costs estimated to be higher than the settlement itself)... and when the dust cleared, here we were, my wife and I, left with no income but a microscopic Social Security cheque, from which is deducted a "premium" for "Medicare coverage": a form of "coverage" which we were soon to learn, through serious illnesses, really amounts to a form of nakedness, since no "self-respecting" "premium" doctor wants to accept Medicare patients (too hard to collect from the government, and too little remuneration, in comparison with what the "private payers" can and do afford).
And yet, and yet...
Occupy? Say what? Where? When? How? And to what end?
I've spent the past few months pondering these questions, drifting in and out of the Occupy sites much as a ghost in the night.
And as yet I have learned, not very much.
Here is a report on my current state of nescience, in these Untied States, as of this particular hour before the dawn.
On another subject, Con, and by the by, as we began here by talking of respect, I should say that -- not that this matters much to anyone but me, I guess -- I've just now put up a link to this fine blog of yours at my own hut. Would have happened long ago, but for that legendary cucaracha-spook from the high desert who crawled out of the silly-sly man's site some years ago, and has been trolling other poetry blogs e'er since much as some mutated Phase IV Gregor Samsa incarnation; once I learned that he -- it? -- has been tracking my guests and links back to their "host" sites, I hesitated to subject you to that. Until I realized that (a) he sometimes wiggles into my space via yours; and (b) the only and inevitable way to exterminate him lay through Moderation. So here, or there, we both are now.
Thanks, Tom
it's a privilege to be linked to your site.
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