ginamarie lobianco: selected poetry 2006-2012

"A great poet always dissolves the technique -- the technique never shows -- is never showing -- true!" (Frank Samperi)


I received one day the most unexpected email from novelist/poet ginamarie lobianco who'd said that friend and mentor John Martone had mentioned my site to her. She'd wondered if I might like to review some of her work at my "Word-Dreamer". Both the self-introduction and affiliation to America's great master of the short verse, of course, endeared me to her instantly. Lately I've been in the mood to celebrate literary mentorship, verse purity and the future of poetry. I'm glad to know ginamarie lobianco.

ginamarie is publisher, novelist and poet but (as poet) successor to a tradition of American short verse and a spiritual poetry I could gladly compare (in its more minimalist haiku and pomes form) to that of Frank Samperi and John Martone. But in what she calls "epic breaths" I detect the freer movements of Ashbery and DiPrima . The haiku, pomes and epic breaths she's been kind enough to have assembled for me form the basis of my estimation of her poetical work. And hers, I find, are the delightful "dissolution" (in Samperian parlance) into oddly engaging literary types, spiritualties and even a (if interestingly postmodern) penchant of her own for opacity and ambiguity. What's resulted from this is a tenderness of the poet's own-- I instantly detect-- that's wedded fragilely to the frighteningly real world of what is, after all, the formless & the spiritless.

In the young artist the preservation of 'forms' in a literary environment not favourable to them will take the imprint of a particularly acute observation of place and circumstances: a style, in short, not different from (her)self at all. In her American haiku series 'form' is easily interchangeable with the place where she calmly gathers her impressions. For instance, there's nostalgia  for the youthful eternities of 60s culture-heroes that's ironic since it's either the Jack [Kerouac] of her poetry or the Jack [Kennedy] of her parents that may be intended:  "life is precious/dead jack", and  a kind of undergraduate reverence for that greatest iconoclast-traditionalist of them all, T.S. Elliot: "i have measured my life/in coffee spoons,/too". She's also capable of sudden (comical) denudations of traditional haiku form itself, as in "free guitar/no strings attached" and of playful versions of the (by now outworn ) language as representation conundrum: "caution:/caution sign". Haiku in lobianco turn into small and arrestingly odd stills but given every bit as much as Eastern haiku to illuminative (aha!) moments through lexical contrasts ("a/part/a/gain"), irreverent nature worship ("making funny faces/at mountains") and even comical effect ("eat a four leaf clover/shit out a luck").

The 'pomes' seem actually to be extended haiku, each line a succession of "stills" juxtaposed for the same sorts of "illuminative" moments as in lobianco's "american haiku". From the first "untitled" pome the following excerpt is typical of the 'haiku' verse:

     And in autumn, when our floor is a red carpet of leaves
      and the windows are covered with
     the bare bones branches of trees that lean towards us,
      from the pink sky,
      the sound of birds singing replaced by the hissing noises of trucks braking, rushing, roaming,
     our new sense of comfort, for anywhere we lay our heads we can call our home.

From this passage arise any number of short verse arrangements, such as "autumn/a red carpet of leaves" in the first two lines and in the next two, "pink sky/bare bones branches of trees", among others. The transformations into short verse are not so much procedural as connatural:  short intensely imagistic bursts that invite observation from many potentially merging viewpoints. Even where poet-narrator intervenes, as in the lines

     And I contemplate what’s frozen there, a gaze
     we’ve both gotten stuck in
     one that couldn’t be
     faked
     three inseparable chains
     and a phoenix from the recycled smoke, a call that never came…

the 'haiku' strands, disparate and yet working towards some unified telling, seem also to call out for individualized attention: such as "a gaze/I contemplate what's frozen" or the more fanciful "a call/a phoenix from the recycled smoke". Perhaps to see the intensely perceived in the quilt of the larger poem  is announced in lobianco's "you can harmonize with just about anything". It's perhaps what saves the poem from the surrealist ménage it might otherwise turn into. I see in her search for the "objective correlative” (again, T.S. Eliot) of keen poetical insight a clear indebtedness to Martone. The poetic pageantry of the young poet is, needless to say, not necessarily that of her teachers or even her own literary models.

Evidence of this poetical insight attuned to (but easily separable from) the intricate whole of  young poet's world is to be found in "The Wish" where the "But I am fixing my Lazarus legs" line acts as both refrain and composite (very Buddhistic) image of the death-in-life that is sexual attraction. As also in the poem's Eliotian anti-heroic images of "mermaids" in "The Wish" and "our sailboat drifting past the drain" in the second pome, "the shape of a home". Literary patrimony--and it's interesting to note the intentional "home" and "pome" rhyme here-- gets reduced to the tedium of home life. Almost every line in "the shape of a home" rings with a fake mythology to which it still laughably aspires: such as mytho-heroic sailboats skirting the drain's own deadly whirlpool, or the indirect references to the Atalanta story in "an awkward race" and "throwing stones/they told us were inherently gold", or the Orphean allusion to "the trees turned to you":

Indian names

our sailboat drifting past the drain

riding the trail

of a horse that never came

an awkward race 

 

throwing stones

they told us were inherently gold

the trees turned to you 

in the shape of a home

with your choice of straw or bricks

or awful tricks 

 

what to believe

when he swore he’d never leave

now his odyssey

a detour setting traps 

for when your horses turn to rats

The "epic breaths" (particularly "No Buffalo") enjoy greater scope with their own sustained lament for lost love or, more probably, a literary imagination native to place ("There is no buffalo"), but, true to its title, is likewise a product of conventions inherited from its predecessors, with every line a possible 'horizontal' haiku, for example, and the entire poem a field of many possible insights into contemporary poetics (very reminiscent of Ashbery). The opening lines give a fairly representative sampling of the whole, particularly in the purposely misapplied epics ("tales of Cyclops santa") and elegiacs ("There is no buffalo/There is no bohemia"). lobianco transgresses genre borders  this way with astonishing facility and offers every line as if it were the only line:

     There
 is
 no 
buffalo


     There
 is 
no 
bohemia


     The 
Indian
 blanket 
wrapped 
in
 winter
 and 
leaving
 me 
like
 some 
sad
 holiday


     Yr
 ghost
 that
 coughs
 like
 my 
heat
 come 
Christmas


     And 
the
 VACANCY 
sign 
is
 begging 
for
 the 
wise
men’s 
forgiveness


     Like
 the 
pizza 
delivery 
boy 
and 
the
 case 
of 
the 
missing 
Monroe



     Which
 wound 
up
on 
his 
door 
with 
tales 
of 
cyclops
 santa 
and 
my 
memories 
of
 you


     When 
it’s 
always 
time 
for 
you 
to
 go


     The 
long 
haired 
child 
left
 me
 with 
my 
balcony
 pre-stoned


     & 
now 
the 
Lost
 Boys 
climb 
it 
in
 the 
middle 
of 
the
 night
 and 
we 
sit 
in
 clouds
 of 
smoke


     And
 I 
don’t
 know
 how
 long 
I
 can
 fight 
them 
off‐
the 
loom 
was
 broke


     And
 I
 can’t
 sleep 
cause 
even
 the 
guitar 
leaks
 and 
we 
put 
the 
X
 in 
the 
box
 just


     As
 a
 joke


"Water Walk", even more freely inventive and daring (a case of lobianco coming more into her own), is both fiercely original and cleverly assimilative, a gradually evolving poetic process of which the poet is very aware. And what seems to be evolving is a sense of the jangling tunes of spirituality in the postmillennial world. Aside from the haiku it is my favourite piece and it's my favourite precisely because it's the most daringly spiritual. Again, only a few lines will give the sense of the whole:

     The
 white
 elephants 
lead 
the 
parade,
 it
 was 
on 
Good 
Friday,



     Coming
 back 
for 
their 
drums 
down 
the 
old 
Avenue



     Marching
 to
 Darn
 That
 Dream
 on
 yr 
wooden 
music box



     Bent 
out
 of
 key 
and 
stomped 
in 
the 
street
 once 
the
 saints 
marched


     Out 
of
 a
 crowd 
of
 circus
 silhouette s
and 
Side car
 Achilles



     Peter 
was
 carving 
disbelief 
with 
Caution
Tape 
to
 block 
the
 streets


     And 
setting 
up 
a 
roadside 
Arcade
 under 
tents 
and 
neon 
lights


     Standing
 under 
the 
awning 
out
 of
 the 
rain


     And
 yawning 
orcas 
carrying 
constellation s
made 
up 
of 
the
 blandly
 expressions 
on
 Jonah’s
 ivory
  face


     And 
when 
grandfather 
clocks 
finish 
up 
at 
the 
docks
 all
 of
 the
 shipwrecked 
orphans
 show 
up 
on
 the
door step 
of
 yr 
place


     And
 leave
 ashes 
on 
yr
 floor 
and 
trip
 down
 yr
 fire 
escape


     And
 yr
 alley
 marshes 
and 
sound 
of
 beer 
can
 crunches



    The 
way 
that
 we 
can’t
 afford 
postage


     Darn
 That
 Dream!


 The whole's either a dream or the nightmarishly real world in which the salvific (of "Good Friday", "Water walk" & "Solomon", "bedpost Beatitudes and Mount Olive mouth organs") fares no better than pure American "spectacle" (of "belching Holidays", "parables 
on 
plates 
at
 rest
 stop 
diner", and "Mount
 Olive’s
 stairways 
going 
out 
of
 business"). Particularly language itself can be seen to "dissolve" in this wasteland: "And
 a
 trapeze 
messenger 
in 
a
 vest
 telling
 tragic 
dangling 
in 
the 
balance 
the
 drip
/ dried 
plastic 
cups
 and 
empty 
tables 
and 
throw
away 
chairs 
about
". I might be tempted to call the poet a viator figure herself and say the "Water walk" journeying is only marginally figurative, the landscape too unmistakably Eliotian, the human drama hidden in thwarted speech all too Beckettian. I even wonder as I read 'Water Walk" what the dialogue and actions of characters referenced here could possibly have been or what they might have meant to anyone if we'd had them. But they did signify to her at least a poet's world and the startling "
euphoric 
machinery 
hum" of American life which it is her unique mandate to record in the most vividly real terms.

I am glad indeed to have met ginamarie lobianco. I couldn't have been more pleasantly startled to discover that (even in the digitized glossolalia of contemporary poetry) introductions are still possible and traditions can be respectfully loosed by the young into new ways to walk on water.  "Darn That Dream!"

Tricennalia: or my 30th in the class

I thank my thirtieth star I kicked at the
 monkey or fatty Montag youth--
the  hand over hand & delicate chin,
and chippy school play s/he's always in:

the years of which the first began with
and continued down to the second
and a sort of a third of a Life dissolved

in plays and thunderbolts! noxious stairs
with the tykes battering down glass--
they who full flower go into my classroom
believing my lone Self so help me or out!

More than clown but less than Toparch:
I dared each one, up and down, here,
I'd say, I-I did til the next error came
and I'd expel, say, boys from the girls--

At these times I also boasted a myriad
smiles til a release, from sameness, just at
my thirtieth: I the Pius and coach, who
wiped filth off their noxious stairs

A reply to a fine but misguided poet

To see, of the twenty odd dead, the one I'd myself made--hadn't I
 for my part, you'd say, well done it, too as being evil as you?--
  means not to see it, at all     Thank you for that, sir

Now I'll give you, the deep stare, onyx-eyed, of the mother
ghoulish botox lip   bodycolour best not seen smudged on walls,
   Billy & Pat, dead both, and abscesses   tending to the heart:--

 if it's not too impertinent to, say, feel the tyke shatter (or be cupped
in a teacher's smile!), and the viscous prayers ever after, paraded
 on stage ever after (as if it's this they do the shootings for)

You well-meaning old Adam, you and thanx for the boyishness
in us all  and making me see, and the buoyant barbarism in us
 all, making smiling onyx-eyed demons tolerable even to me

                      A tip of the fedora to you, good sir

For Sandy Hook Elementary School

 

 "Safety and security don't just happen, they are the result of collective consensus and public investment. We owe our children, the most vulnerable citizens in our society, a life free of violence and fear." (Nelson Mandela)



Charlotte Bacon, 6

 Daniel Barden, 7

 Olivia Engel, 6

 Josephine Gay, 7

 Ana Marquez-Greene, 6

 Dylan Hockley, 6

 Madeleine Hsu, 6

 Catherine Hubbard, 6

 Chase Kowalski, 7

 Jesse Lewis, 6

 James Mattioli, 6

 Grace McDonnell, 7

 Emilie Parker, 6

 Jack Pinto, 6

 Noah Pozner, 6

 Caroline Previdi, 6

 Jessica Rekos, 6

 Avielle Richman, 6

 Benjamin Wheeler, 6

 Allison Wyatt, 6

 Rachel Davino, 29

 Dawn Hocksprung, 47

 Anne Marie Murphy, 52

 Lauren Russeau, 30

 Mary Sherlach, 56

 Victoria Soto, 27

Some Spiritual Letters: by David Miller

 

"May 5. Cold. Resolved to be a religious

  May 12. I cannot think of altering anything. Why shd. I? I do not write for
                the public. You are my public and I hope to convert you."
                                                           G. M. Hopkins (Journals/Letters)


Any intersections with the spiritual poetics of Frank Samperi today are rare as they are beautifully insightful: I purposely seek and celebrate them and not because of my own scholarly interests in the person I consider contemporary America's greatest poet-mystic. Samperi's time has come. As relatively brief and largely uneventful as Samperi's life was, he was bound to attract a few of the best spiritual 'lights': certainly Robert Kelly, Robert Lax, John Levy and David Miller had been marked by it. It was particularly with the young poet from Australia, David Miller, Samperi confessed to feeling a particularly deep kinship. Miller was not just an admirer but defender of perhaps the one American poet whom the Objectivists would have had most reason to fear (if, of course, he'd had the hearing he'd deserved). The young Miller seemed to have understood that very well.

Miller's own interest in Samperi had come originally through Corman's Gist of Origin anthology and a review by Clayton Eshleman (which by Samperi's account Miller had found unfavourable). It was through Miller's help that Samperi's The Kingdom (for which Miller had written the Afterword ) was published in the UK (Todmorden: Arc Publications) in 1975. Samperi had certainly thought highly enough of the promising young poet to begin a four-year correspondence with Miller, even  recommending him to the esteemed editor of Utano: as he said in his 4/6/77 letter to Cid Corman (excerpted here with permission), "I think he's got something...and yes! his intelligence his honesty...So you see Australia (known for rare singers) brings forth, too!" Miller repaid the kindness with his own personal tribute in his December 1991 "Obituary: Frank Samperi", saying that "he was essentially a man of real generosity, and I will never forget the way he befriended and encouraged me, as a younger writer, when I first contacted him in the late 1970s."

David Miller has been kind enough to send me not only his articles on Samperi but some selections (Series 6, #1, #7 and #8) from his ongoing Spiritual Letters writing project announced here. I'd like to reflect on these because I believe, if I do so attentively enough, I will perceive the generous hand of the spiritual master from whom this "rare singer" had inherited much. It's certainly not a case of 'imitation' but of Miller's own intuitive affinities for what Samperi (in his 80s Corman correspondences) had called the "atrium": a uniquely sacred 'lighted' space where the world's hard conditions can "dissolve" (as Samperi would always say) into a poetry of exquisite purity. Samperi's Letargo is the exemplum of a poetics of "lethargy" or "forgetfulness" that amounts to a momentary 'ecstasy'. The similarities with Miller's "Spiritual Letters" are worth noting just in terms of that place where spiritual poetries really originate. However, Miller has taken that Samperian sense of dissolution to its true holocaustal ends.

In his Series 6, #1 piece there are moments of "lethargy" that lie interspersed (set off by italics) among the events of a homecoming, burial and postburial reminiscences on an enigmatically Maximilian Kolbe-figure the circumstances of whose life and death seem also too unmiraculously prosaic.

After the memorial service, we visited the cemetery and drank ouzo and poured it over his grave. We went on to a taverna, and exchanged stories about him, surprising each other over and again. He spread linseed oil varnish over the painting's surface with his fingers, removing the excess with the heel and side of the hand. To touch, to kiss: as if the chasm didn't exist. The fire forms itself into a sail in the wind, then a vault, enclosing him. Deported to the labour camp, he was stripped of his priestly garments, shaved of hair and beard. He shared the little bread he had with those who were sick or dying, up until the time he was shot..

There seem to be journeys without compass, encomiums without clearly named bodies and even entire countryside villages without lineage (as if we'd gotten a view from an Auschwitz train). The ordinariness of travel, family and even reflections on art, all meaning to be cross-referenced somehow, do undermine any sense of a single sustainable hagiography (as if the piece were about a single Kolbe-type figure), which is, of course, the effect of the porousness of prose poetry. Any attempt at a description of the gallery painting, for example, would have robbed the whole of its ineffability: any mention of artisic 'referents' would certainly be as inexplicable as the identity of the poet-narrator, a lone viator travelling presumably alone until his encounter with the female cicerone (or lady with "with the scarf over her dark hair"), or even as inexplicable as the exact nature of his wanderings.

She wandered through gallery after gallery, finally stopping when she came across someone standing absorbed in front of a large abstract painting. Recognising it from a previous life, she said to him: You know, I did that. From the long, horizontal upstairs window, I could see fog drifting across and enveloping the bay. Eight years of painting and re-painting, building up and scraping back and building up, gluing pieces of wood and bits of jewellery to the surface and painting over them... -- Should I attempt a description?

Perhaps the whole spiritual letter began and ended, in rêve , at "the long, horizontal upstairs window" only (as so many of Samperi's own most intensely spiritual illuminations did) or "in front of a large abstract painting": in either case, the place is essentially the same. Window and paintings are just surface skim to the essential dream state in which  poet-mystics and faceless travellers alike participate . Between the "travelling home" and final pronouncement on the essential unintelligibility of the "Material Ideal" (again, Samperi) there can only be these moments of world-"forgetfulness" always  ranging (however fitfully) "to infinity". It's certainly better to "forget" than to continue with these terrible reminiscences.

The Series 6, #7 and #8 pieces similarly gather around the same sort of unnameable (but not inexplicable) roommates and gallery hosts and even a university tutor, and in both( what I thought the mention of boats and a traveller from Greece had made obvious in the #1 piece) a sense of the l'Autre too smudged by mundaneness to be of any real philosophical interest. But it's not a spirituality bludgeoned by Beckettian dialogue either, though there is dialogue here. A narrative interspersed with verse this time--giving them both the feel of a haibun--is its unitive force, trying to dissolve life's unbearable antinomies (of childhood and spiders, baby cubs playing with toys and a dogs bitten on the face, cozy flats and lashing rains) into a final immersive, almost covenantal 'sea' image: "It's the sea that the heart lives on, and the sea is salt; it's salt the heart lives on. A stark ark.    Often one by one, and none by none at times. Wind, hail, heavy rain, thundersnow...heart's beat."(#7)

The deceptive stillness of #8, or the temptation to dwell on more forms of youthful dreams, is a prelude to the holocaustal. Here's a certain cross-reference to the Kolbe-figure in #1 that's made the turn to the ovens more certain. It's the only way to prepare the child for the "everything you desire is permissible" lie. In the face of this, there's the more realistic adulthood of faeries who turn suddenly mean & lay the innocents on burning coals. And no amount of "bad boys, cigarettes in their mouths, cocky poses" will help carry her into sunny Junes. To a Jew, the child or dreamer "You either burn or you swim..." To continue the journey by ship motif, as we do again here, is to find oneself this time jumping into a sea of corpses.

To Samperi's "lethargy" there's Miller's more horrible henosis (or purificatory cleansing of worldly dross): perhaps itself a type of genocidal unity of "Spark, flame, smoke" to which everything's ultimately reduced in the spiritual letters, relegating even imaginative reality to phantasm or dream. Of the poet's elemental water, earth and fire not a single one escapes destruction. Samperi had mentioned a sort of "spiritual conversion" to Hebraism in his Corman correspondences and characterized the outright rejection of his own writings as "holocaustal". Perhaps attuned to this sense of the slaughter of literary innocents begun in Samperi, Miller's consigned the imaginative efforts of any essentially disprized spiritual poetics to a final perdition: "in dark looking out". The young David Miller had understood very well, indeed.

Obama poetry

I'm exceedingly happy Obama's been re-elected. I was moved by his 2008 Inauguration to write the following poem (from my Bridget Bird collection). In honour of his recent election victory (and more particularly in honour of the man himself), I'd like to post it here. I wish President Obama four more years of justice, fairness and a deep respect for differences everywhere in the world.

 

Word!

_____________________________

   

INAUGURATION

 

How much like Lincoln’s it’d be (to judge by the proud walk),

 if after a dusting of salt on the brow,
he’d be placed between scripture leaves, or on a throne
  sitting bony-kneed by the potted groves
                                                                of Lahore or Kenya,—

 And winds in a reflecting pool how much calmer they’d be
  if presidentials before him
had worn pastoral robes instead of pendent scarves,
  and shiny crystals over the Congress
stopped tipping their light (for once!) to the toothy lords
                                                                                     of Virginia

And how those Irish smiles would finally cease smiling

  (and keep plates clinking)
if toasts frozen at eye level and one too many stately balls
  & collars, straps that’ve lost their starch
were a prelude to council or a good night’s sleep
 

And light, unflappable a bird as he is, springing to the hoops,

  how nicely he’d give us back the sky
(if anyone that slim or equable or cool could,
  in robes or a Tux)—
                                                             his dear unflappable sky

Autumn verse (from "Goodbye to Soul")

I on a majolica morn, saw
  myself flung scurrying over a world, I solus
     & afraid to jump--

& a squirrel's half-slit eye try fly
                                                through me!

Felix metaphysicum

Proposition 1

To suffer feral space,

                                    as
I have

                                    as
  the moth sheds and
  flames dim,

                                    as
  even horripilant geese
  fly,
                            as

  groundable, hard and
  brunal life is                            

                                    as
  ants misidentify sky
  & fail to agree if
  it's sky at all

-- silly fallibilist ant!--
                                  

What nudged this man-monist into
 the Ditch, anyways:

• the resistance of open arms
• the oily bead in a frog's leal eye
• the christ in every shivery post-dream?

Ach!
         I spit on any or some 'You' or 'there' as
         having no
                        Ital 
                             at
                                all

                                    

Felix in a mood for some sabre-rattling

"But this heaven, namely the firmament, is corporeal"
                                                                              (Origen)


Who doesn't try debarring the moon
                                                    these days?

And Jubals, that are commonplace, that
  clack as they grin, of course,
                                    & who always mean  to

          --meaning-monkeys!--
                                                      why, they're the worst


Was it not the whole, and not some "part-world"
                                                                 I fell into,
  for you?

Look--

             Pert idealists and amigos know that
             Two, with the other below
              educing and joyful,
               made One
                   solus
                     horripilant (as the geese fly)
                       sky-affirming
                         cheer!
                           
                       
There was no part-world, none that I could ever see

Malala Yousafzai tribute at 'Word-Dreamer':& a call for a Canadian Malala Anthology

Dear poet-friends,

as you know I was asked to be a co-editor for a special FutureCycle Press Anthology for Malala Yousafzai and have sent out many invitations to friends and colleagues to send submissions. However, I've been rather unceremoniously removed from that position when it became clear to the publisher(s) that I was being too pro-Canadian in my selection of poems and generally too tough as editor, especially in regards to submissions from Americans. It was only until I first posted my own little tribute to Malala here and Joseph Hutchison his afterwards that FutureCycle, inspired by our posts, developed the idea of a special Anthology edition.

I'm calling out to Canadian publishers to perhaps pick up the impetus I started at 'Word-Dreamer' and begin our own Anthology. I'd be more than happy to share editing duties. In the meantime I'll continue to celebrate Malala here and ask that you please send to me at 'Word-Dreamer' any poetry that the recent shooting by the Taliban of Malala Yousafzai, a fourteen-year old blogger and women's education rights activist in Pakistan, may have recently inspired you to write. I will post all submissions as they are given to me at cdidiodato@yahoo.ca or cdidiodato@gmail.com. Any format & style (provided they be respectful) will be accepted.

Let's celebrate here the exemplary courage and dignity of this remarkable young person.

Thank you!
__________________________


1) Malala--
  walking hand in hand,
   a steep staircase

Conrad DiDiodato

 

2) The Harrows of Halloween
 

This night of black-leaf key

opens the old door between worlds,

the dead I knew flit through, cast no shadows

on the moist opened earth,

the dead I did not know this orbit

come costumed through

grimace at my puzzled witness,

for in this ancient valley

dead-sight is granted

to the fay-touched few.

They affirm connection

the helix thread of everything

since the singularity of creation.

The earth is old

her children seek forbidden revelation

unhallowed Halloween a harrowing.
 

Katherine L. Gordon

October 31st. 2012.

3) Malala

Malala, your name sounds like a song
but it means grief-stricken in Urdu,
language of poets. You are named
after a poet, a warrior woman and
you have so lived up to your name.

The courage it takes to cross borders
defined by others, courage to uphold
freedom to read, learn, speak­ to be
the fully human that is all our birthright.

“Every girl in Swat is Malala. We will
educate ourselves. We will win. They
can't defeat us,” states her classmate.

Now it’s our turn to take up the call,
education for every child for which
women and girls today rally across
India, Pakistan and Afghanistan lands.

Malala, Malala. I hear the ululation
of lament and of celebration for her.
Can you hear what she’s crying? You
can join her common cause. But
how fares the girl in her hospital bed?

That beautiful face blasted. Her voice
silenced, her eyes shut. Hang on, girl,
hang on. There’s work to be done and we
desperately need such spirit among us.
 

Her father cries when Malala falls that all
Pakistan stands up. And now she too can
stand, what will Pakistan do? March on...

Grief is no time for emotion. Let sky open
and open to more sky. Light, we call for
light to dispel the darkest oppression. Her
name on a million lips in many tongues.

Malala, Malala, Malala. Hear the ululation

and respond.

Penn Kemp


4) Ed Baker's haiga tribute to Malala entitled "Sudden Sharp Pain" (click on image to enlarge):

5) Speaking Out
 

Raising the voice to speak against injustice 

puts the speaker on a path of collision

from those who vehemently oppose their ideas.

One young blogger, Malala, dared to do so

Speaking out about life in the Swat Valley

the need for girls to be educated

Pakistan and the world has taken note

of the attempted murder of this girl 

yet where was the outcry when many Malalas

Ayeshas, Ahmads and Bilals were killed by drones?

Who spoke up for them on the world stage?

People like you and me, living out their lives

their existence snuffed  out by unpiloted drones

hope of their families, cut down where they stood.

Injustice is a blight upon humankind

those who perpetrate it will be judged harshly

in the history books of future generations.

People who want harmony and peace

mothers, fathers, sons and daughters

young and old, let us work together

to eradicate injustices.
 

©Wilma Seville2012

6) Malala's Beads

Midway up the mountain,

on the day the bullets struck,

a flock of patterned Chukars,

the Partridge of Pakistan,

stood in feathered silence

as though they knew

your voice was stifled,

and the Sage

who sensed their stillness

strung your words

on mala beads,

said she learned

what lasts forever

when a thousand pairs of wings

filled the sky with sudden flight,

blessing schoolgirls with their shadows

beneath a streaming, soaring sun.

Andreas Gripp

The new 'realism' as expounded by Felix

"the alliterative platitude world-weary
  coming to mind"
                                                 (Frank Samperi, The Expulsion)


It's too anthroporeal, says the chic Roi, with
  glee,
that a void absurd judgementally human thing
  as 'me' shall fly-

or  the being-er, thought or rather a type of
  theory rooted deep in
   guys who try

to always stretch or rejig ugly brunal worlds of
   their choosing

Oh! Bachelard, elard........

At any or over my dead dream, explanandum
  sensual we may be, a relief from
  le  Maître -

as every smiley Po saith, superidealist-

at best a red momenta in
                       a
                         fallible
                                 frog
                                       eye

   
                            (we'll always be)
 

Cid Corman: "Sun Rock Man"

Cid Corman

Sun Rock Man, of all the many books of poetries, is the work that is the most closely of a piece with Cid Corman's "complete abode" poetics. The unembellished language of observation in which Corman excels can fuse easily with the "poverty undisguised, unmitigated" of Matera (capital city of the province of Matera in southern Italy). As how couldn't it? The poetry is a work of meridional heat and sun, of ancient rock and village customs: the accustomed materials of the poet with some one hundred poetry publications to his name. And there isn't just the outline of Corman's poetical landscape but the balzante of eye and language rhythms , the very teeming of "place" with its own distinctive "livingdying".

To feel as Corman does the "rain rot/rock" ("THE TUFA") of this "inland region between the Ionian sea and the Adriatic" (more particularly "where the/valleys/cross/winds//thrash and/the sun/pales/weeds") is certainly a distinctive type of poetry writing. But it's important to feel how Corman feels the place & keeps to the forefront the exquisitely alluring mystery of the "rock" whereon sun and (wo)man trudge together. Observations begin and end with the "paleolithic" and must range beyond the senses into a sort of collective psyche from which the poet who can only see will be necessarily excluded. His rhythms--and they are superb!-- succeed in quieting the terrors of cultural aloneness, and this only for the sake of preserving the dignities of his temporary Matera home. The poetry's in the details of oppressive heat and the intractability of "carved rock" everywhere, perilous "pits/under the piles of hay" ("the barn") and empty temples to the sun and yet the result is always a deepening friendship, a confraternity perhaps or certainly unfeigned sympathy with the lifecycles of a place Corman has grown to love.

Place grows into love and from love can arise, among other things, the effortless motion of rock-dwellers who avoid and yet self-create in the sun, getting easily out of and into the commonplaces of "sun/on sun" and "stone on/stone" because they are peculiarly born to it :

to get
out of the sun
these rocks
blatant rocks

kids hop-
ping hot cobbles
flip coins
under carts

of sun
whose leadpoles un-
harnessed
hail the sun

women
ages of old
cramped black
mend shadows

men and
mules and sun creep
down to
the bottom

a sun
on sun on sun
stone on
stone on stone

bottom
building for them
a dry
common well (from NO WAY)

Familiarity with language and customs (and Corman knew both very well) discloses the outside and deep interior thrum of village life, as does a poet's own sympathetic heart. Corman never wrote what he didn't love. "I do not know them. I love them./How can I not?" (I Contadini) Nor did he write anything that he didn't thoroughly see as it was, in life as in his own poetry.The buckled and black-vested old people ("The Old Men") soiled in the life of Matera, the "carter/cursing his horse" (reading Vico) or the man on the "jogging mule" (The Geographer), children who "irk each other" (the porch) because of the heat or the sidewalk artist copying the saint of Murillo in chalk (the sidewalk)--if any of these are to be accessed only through the usual literary sensoria, it's little more than ornate traveller's reportage. Corman also had to be 'there' and move with it.

Matera, if anything could personify it, can be a type of  Friday night ritual (Serra Venerdi) or a scene of men working in the hills (The labors), a walk through almond groves (The Almond Trees), a visit to the town square ( The Stars at Piazza Pascoli): it can be not just these but, in fact, any one of a number of myths or remembered collectivities, provided only that the town always form a backdrop to a narrative as ancient as its rock, cruel as the hodiernal heat. Rock, sun and (wo)man--and a town's personages vary as much as "La Signorina", "Professor Nitti" and even the cave-dweller counseling Corman in spices-- are a poetry's constants here. Even in death (certainly an "occasion") the town pauses for only a moment:

when one man dies
all go

the town dies a
moment

at attention
head bared

the procession
goes on

one studies not
to breathe

or breathe with the
earth's breath

sharing a plot
of grass

returning to
seeming

perhaps less than
ever

There's a quiet dignity to rock whose presence is both maternal and ontic, culling Matera itself  from 'madre' (mother)  and 'terra' (earth), the ground of life in both of those uniquely literal senses. Shall we call it a drama as well? As see in the name "La Calamita" both the forces of a cafe ("The place to be seen") and  a sense of the irreality of life outside it: or the even more remarkable reenactment of "I Promessi Sposi"in a sunlit square. The square, cave-home ("prehistoric slum/from whence they come") and parched valley are each not a stage so much as a proscenium where action is more than viewing and tragically less than direct engagement in the forces that shape & wither. Or is the whole essentially operatic: with the usual accompaniments of "Marta Marta" or squealings of an "idiot-daughter" or festival musicians dressed in "navy-blue"?

The town is continually prey to the double 'mother'/'earth' movements, which it is the poet's duty to record. Sun Rock Man is this durable drama and song wrenched out of rock, erupting into the occasional form of the carnevalesque (Luna Park) or religio-bacchanalian (La Bruna). They live by the one inescapable force--call it poverty, piazza, the interminable "landscape of stone"--that, like it not, makes them cling to each other. The religious import of "Rock"--because Italy is a deeply pious nation--is not just stone cold tabernacle to a collective psyche that has nowhere to go but "over and over/the same ground" (the monologue): it's essentially the hope of a return to an abyssal dark night that will be a little more bearable the next day :

People and night, night
and people. To get
out. To get together.

They walk under the
arched white posts under
laced lights as if married.

They pass the skulls carved
on the shoals of the
Church of Purgatory.

They pace to the bleat
of the old bland or
wait at the edge. For what?

For whatever it
is. They want the sound,
of it, the deafening,

and then they go on
over and over
the same ground, half-embraced

for fear of nowhere
to go and nothing
to find whey they get there. ("the monologue")

Corman who both knew and loved Italian people and their literature--among the many he'd promoted or published in Origin were Nobel poet Eugenio Montale, novelist Ignazio Silone and philosopher Giorgio Agamben--also knew because he himself would embrace self-exile as a literary vocation. Matera and Kyoto have produced similar poetries for knowing Cid Corman. I've never known a writer (certainly as evident in his letters) more estranged from his native home: born, it seems, to the poetics of i forestieri. Sun Rock Man is a distinctive type of "livingdying" he'd heard in the quarries and caves, marketplaces and Aragon churches. Whether it's the peculiarly moldy rock of Matera and "white-moustached" souls of its backlands, Corman's is a work that could anthologize any peoples and places. He had the genius and heart for it.

Raymond Souster: in memoriam

"His ashes should be carried up Yonge St. by elephants"
                                                            (Joe Fiorito,Toronto Star)


Poet-editor James Deahl has just alerted us to the passing of a great Canadian poet, Raymond Souster. Below is the text of James's announcement. I've reflected on Souster's poetry here. Deahl's own introduction to Souster's book of verse Big Smoke Blues can be read here.

Thank you, James!
________________________________-

Canada lost one of its greatest poets yesterday. Here is the bio note I wrote for The Ambassador not very long ago.

Raymond Souster was born in Toronto during 1921 and has been a leading member of the Great Generation for the past 70 years. Souster won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1964 (for The Colour of the Times), was presented with Canada’s Centennial Medal in 1967, won the City of Toronto Book award in 1979 (for Hanging In), and was made an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1995. He was a founding member of the League of Canadian Poets and served as LCP President from 1967 to 1971. He is the author of well over 70 books, largely of poetry, most recently Easy Does It and Never Counting the Cost.

 

Souster served in the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II. In the 1950s, he edited first Contact and later Combustion, the foremost Canadian poetry magazines of their day. He also ran Contact Press for 15 years (1952 – 1967), which published many of Canada’s most important contemporary poets. Souster lives in Toronto with his wife Rosalia.

Or you can check Ray on Google. In my short bio I only hit some (but certainly not all) of the highlights. The bio on Google has not been updates since 2006, so it does not mention Ray’s most recent 13 books. You read correctly, 13 new books in 6 years. And a 14^th book was almost completed.

Below are two of the last poems Raymond Souster wrote. One is a love poem (Ray never stopped writing love poems) and the other is one of his best Christian poems.

Silver Creek

 

She has become

the magical silver creek

of his boyhood’s hot

summer afternoon,

meandering lazily

beneath a leafy canopy

through which

the mottled sunshine

faintly shines.

Now in his imagination

he cups both hands

and dips them in

her gently murmuring stream,

getting at least

one thirsty sip

of her life-renewing water

with the certainty

that her wondrous presence

will never happen again

in his lifetime.

 

Good Friday

 

While 4,700

advance pool election stations

are being readied across

the length and breadth

of this fair land,

Roman soldiers

are tying the wrists

and nailing the feet

of our Jesus Christ,

and while children

are hunting excitedly

through the grass

for chocolate-covered eggs

of Easter,

His thirst-driven cries

are being cruelly answered

by those same soldiers

raising on a pole

to His lips

a cloth soaked in vinegar,

and while Earth Day celebrations

occurring at the same time

find many people

planting much needed trees,

the tortured head

of the Son of God

sinks down

and with a last moan of pain

is released from this world.

Fraternally,

. . . James

Felix

(for Felix Baumgartner)


It's worth--as, i.e. in hearts--the Wains
  and circles, star-blossoms,
in time to grow into this Nietzschean

Twinscrewing worlds & my smallness, like this--
  it's done at last!
or in this Kampflatz of a life

falling like something vatic, & bursting
  across the eye

To be told everything's reducible to fear of error
  even up at the top--

god! let us begin