Ferris Park

Look, if Spring pressing on and on,  is real and very matutinal,
(as in the sense of some god named Aton
  and scalding leaf),

I see it or I don't:

and the victualage of one single bud,  and its priority to be
(if it happen just once to be down here!)
  won't stay bud for long,

any more than the leaf in the said park can give back its hell,
once the bud's been pressed into a fist
  And yet the offshoot

  and smelly effluvia...

The impression is not of formidable dusk either  thrown back
  --to let the terns fly thru!--

any more than the noose on the projective limb, & one angry boy,
is, leaving angry boys to die in far left field
  So between Life sucking on night,

  and a  malefic Tree
the shitty effluvia stirring at my feet,
  Spring pulled tight

Jerry Friesen: a personal tribute

"My heart is my own, the trapped hare belongs to the hour"
                                                                  (Frank O'Hara)


The sudden death of an individual known for his exceptional running and commitment to competitive racing in the Niagara region is tragic enough. I am particularly saddened because I knew Jerry and had run with him years ago in countless long- and short-distance races (He was by far the stronger and more impassioned runner). I also remember Jerry as a very kind, encouraging and inspiring person.

It's tragic that very fit and dynamic people can be whisked away in an instant, as Jerry was. It's a reminder to people like me that commitment to strenuous physical activity must be its own reward: because if the limits are unknowingly transgressed and the run happens to be your last, the hope is that the breathing, rhythm and intoxicating pains of exertion will have been our only comforts.

It's been many years since I've run with Jerry but here I homage his spirit: I homage as poetical the sport of running whose elegant exemplar he was for so many years.

A tern's passing shadow--
  the runner

Diane Di Prima

There are few female poets with the literary stature and importance of a Diane Di Prima. As Bob Arnold has described her to me in a recent email, "In the 60s Diane di Prima was for me the truest and boldest and freest sort of individual, woman, and poet. She wrote, she loved, she published, she printed others, she swung, she danced, she was in with the guys (Beats), she was with women activists, she was a feminist, she was a mother, she was alive. Truly alive. And it's never let-up. A Collected Poems so long ago now already and she's lived many lives to have more and more Collected Poems in the works. Something's gotta give."

And yet sadly one of America's most respected literary figures needs financial help in order to cover the costs of expensive medical treatment. I am grateful to Bob Arnold for bringing this to our attention today. I vacillate between sadness and anger: sadness at the failing health of a great poet and anger (especially anger!) at a goddamn American run-for-profit health care system that lets its national treasures suffer these indignities. I love Di Prima's poetry, I love her spirit and passion for life and yes, I particularly love her beautiful Italianness.

Donations to Diane Di Prima may be given here.

Earth Day!

I wish Earth years more of gills and ears
  the strega's blue-grey hair
  girl-saints about to fire into love,

  arrows over them (I mean Saugeen plants!)
  installed in some alcove--

  the liquid doves at my fence;
 
  raccoon with leaden snout
  seeing into me
  and storming for release, too;

  rabbits yoked to my gardens,
  who have to be there also, of course,
  risibly still,

  arrows over their heads, too; and

  gooey fish milt in the lake
  (were you only sentient enough to see!)--

 I wish years of the bird-headed, & all but grey
  hair of a poet's wife,
  gall wasp
  with the linear to heart-shaped eye

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

   Thrips uprear to adhere
to joints, to the base, to napes,
to the underface of numerators on foot.
Thrips and thrums from lupine heaps.

   As the lee of each caravel, unraveled
without Americanizing, snorts loudly,
plow handles give way in a calamitious spasm,
with a puny pulse unfortunately given
to blowing its nose on the back of its wrist.
                 (from Trilce, César Vallejo)

The bad...

An
orange
our
sun
fire
pulp

whets
us
(everyday)
for
us
eat
it
its
fire's
unconsumed
         (from "A"- 14, Louis Zukofsky)
________________________________

Olson couldn't read Zukofsky and neither can I: music! By virtue of the tin-eared! I just can't read it!

Vallejo, however, nervously "thrums" with it, down to the bristly thrip wing. A music for insect and tree. If insects kill the tree, at least you can hear it, silently but steadily gutted til it crumble like the last one. There is, and a true poetry must record, the gnawing of the palmated leaf and the shiny twig til it fall into some rhapsody, too. And I haven't even begun to talk about the ships. Just imagine!

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

what you do  (if you do)
is to learn
from writing haiku
is  not how to count to seven
count to five  but
rather
what you come to realize
and to practice
is
that EVERY line
every word
counts
& must       'do their job'
precisely
&
on time
every syllable roams
in it s own field
goes this way
the
that way
on it s
own two 'legs'
it is an huge field
in which
every syllable
every word
has room/space
(in their owned field)
to breathe

to
(as Nanao Sakaki put it , to:
sing
dance
leave

(a spontaneous manifesto as a poem by Ed Baker: composed while listening to
doves coo   Sunday, April 15, 2012.  9:15 a.m.)

The bad...

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means
                ("Introduction to Poetry", Billy Collins)
______________________________________

When Baker and Sakaki do it the form turns magnificently on itself to mirror "every syllable/every word", which is the way to learn writing. It goes without saying that the poem ought to go like this, i.e. in its "owned field", "on its own two legs" but the wise gnomic heart never tires of saying it. With Collins, however, every bit of it's tied to metaphor turned to a silly caricature of itself, and the poem's been said like this so many times, published in so many New Yorkers & so completely gutted it just can't see itself anymore. God! a poem tied to a chair.

My apologies to Baker for the comparison: Issa would have been better. I haven't mentioned haiku either. But in 2012 there's Baker and there's Collins. Collins and the whole mainstream crowd of them who just don't know when to leave.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.
          (from "The Fall of Rome", W.H. Auden)

The bad...

Sometimes in mid-April we fill our hot-tubs
with Perrier water, we are so pacific, west
coasting through spring, casting not a thought
to our poor cousins in Toronto, slogging

through dirty snow to their cute restaurants
with nifty names. Casting not a thought
but delivering an image if we can, posing
wisely as the people who were foresighted enough

to create a city with warm winters. Would anyone,
they ask in gelid Ottawa, live on the edge out there
except for the weather? This will make
a good enough question for a gentle poem to pose
                           (from "Van, Can", George Bowering)
____________________________________

Since when did music and diction not count anymore? Two places, two times and yet two 'musics' as wildly different as these could not have been better imagined. It's rather the difference between aria and hitchhiking. In the one case, a poet sits at an outside cafe stirring epochs into his coffee, with a full view of Etna or Umbrian vineyards, noting rhythms, Sibylline prophecies; in the other, just kids in sneakers with limited imaginations, limited coordinates looking for a free ride. In a country as monstrously vast as Canada nothing's easier than to go hitchhiking in sneakers from Toronto to Ottawa. Good grief, and from this a Poet Laureate is sprung!

And as for 'gelid': well, only Keats knew how to use that word.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

photograph by Ed Baker

The good...

4/ You want what
every
one always

wants: to have
all and yet
never have

to give. To
die -- and live
beyond death.

But isn't
that -- had -- just
what this is?

5/ Here I am
like a leaf
falling or

fallen. Point-
less as one --
as any--

all. Holding
mother's hand
though she's gone.
   (from Origin, April 1982, Cid Corman)

The bad...

In scraggy lingo lost
high mean--
times petering, thickets of
lex & scrawn:
split for abysmal, hopalong
underword, head for no exit,
grapshrapnel yore spelunking.
Fractal untongue.
            (from Un, Dennis Lee)
______________________________

The tongue and vellum clearly at odds make the bad bad--try saying "In scraggy lingo lost" quickly!-- and yet it's taken as good "open field" speech, fit for Canadian anthologies & tenure trackers. Lee's 'unpoem'. Partout. The sage of Utano knew, however, that the poem is always a leaf fallen and that the gift is never more graciously given than when it's fallen. Freely and with love.

Cid, always had the dear final word in these matters: always letting the beloved hand go.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Come my little eunuchs, my little virgins,
It is time you were home and in bed;
The wind is strong and cold on the streets
And it is almost eleven o'clock.

Soon the whores will be obvious at the corners
And I would not have you accosted or given the eye:
Soon the drunks will be turned out of the beverage rooms
And I would not have you raped in a dark lane.

Go, find your house and insert the key and put down the night-lock.
Undress with the blinds down and touch the pillows, and dream
Of Pickthall walking hand in hand with her fairies
And Lampman turning his back on Ottawa.
                       (from "To the Canadian Poets", Raymond Souster)

The bad... 

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details.
               (from "Bored", Margaret Atwood)
______________________________

Always the saws and boredom with husbands looking predictably like Canadian stereotypes (especially in her fictions): always and intolerably the same, in woods or out. Atwood poetry played to specs like this, of course, makes feminist readings possible and always intolerably the same. Abhorrent...

Souster's Toronto, being more preferable to me because wider and colder, at least doesn't mask its whores and warnings, always as real as the night-lock. And nothing certainly abstains from Ottawa (synonymous with Atwood!) like Acorn among the homeless & unjustly convicted, Plantos with manuscripts under his arm, Purdy turned to stone. Ray's poems have always been for them.The next time Atwood and Ondaatje come skipping by, ready for their next $60 000 dinner, may Souster loose his whores and cold streets on them!

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

pausing
    where stream
        pauses


                             one
                             peb
                             ble's
                             got

                             a
                             pin
                             hole
                             cave


                             holding
                             this

                             3
                             centi

                             meter
                             stone--

                             cliff
                             in hand

                             &
                             leaping
                        (from diorama, John Martone)




The bad...

FLOWERS

for Joanne

sunburn

of the toes and feet

afterwards

showers

must on a shoe

sure arm today

didn't we turn


off the television

the more fresh beach you wash the cars
                   (from SENTENCES, Robert Grenier)
________________________________

In minimalist writing there's "receptional poetics" or there's nothing. The work is received. There's the received tensions of tradition and its wonderful "dissolutions", as Frank said, like the falling pebble whose diameter is indistinguishable from the "cliff in hand", or there isn't. There's, in short, the difference between that ineffable leap from stream stillness--is the pebble in hand or the pebble alone doing the leaping?--and Grenier's always studded ordinariness. The effect in Grenier is of the dreary afternoon sunburn on a deserted beach. Which is just what it set out to do.

It's always through the eye of the pinhole, however, that great verses fall...

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Live with me on Earth among red berries and the bluebirds
And leafy young twigs whispering
Within such little spaces, between such floors of green, such
figures in the clouds
That two of us could fill our lives with delicate wanting:

Where stars past the spruce copse mingle with fireflies
Or the dayscape flings a thousand tones of light back at the
sun—
Be any one of the colours of an Earth lover;
Walk with me and sometimes cover your shadow with mine.
                  (From "Live With Me On Earth Under the Invisible Daylight Moon", Milt Acorn)

The bad...

All green ends up eventually
churning in her left cheek.
Her mouth is a laundromat of spinning drowning herbs.
She is never in fields
but is sucking the pith out of grass.
I have noticed the very leaves from flower decorations
grow sparse in their week long performance in our house.
The garden is a dust bowl.

On our last day in Eden as we walked out
she nibbled the leaves at her breasts and crotch.
But there's none to touch
none to equal
the Chlorophyll Kiss      
                (From "Notes for the Legend of Salad Woman", Michael Ondaatje)

_____________________________________

When you mix the politics of art with Canada you get Ondaatje riding wide-hipped to Ottawa, who's not just the destroyer of haiku but perhaps the country's worst imitator of Atwood leaferies. I do recall the man being snubbed at a Lorine Niedecker centennary not too long ago. Of Acorn, however, of the redberries and birds of Earth eating out of the homeless hand, and of copse perfume and the sun's own thousand shades fluttering in the poet's eye, and of the fires along Spadina Ave and Milt's love of thundering whiskey jacks (a typically Easterner thing!),  I'll always say softly and always in deference to the man's own personal saintliness that it'd be vain and pretentious to talk about anything else here.

May the pure limbs of Acorn lead us all to a true People's Poetry.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

see myself staggering through deep snow
lugging blocks of wood yesterday
an old man
almost falling from bodily weakness
— look down on myself from above
then front and both sides
white hair — wrinkled face and hands
it's really not very surprising
that love spoken by my voice
should be when I am listening
ridiculous
yet there it is
a foolish old man with brain on fire
stumbling through the snow
                    (from "Listening to Myself", Al Purdy)

The bad...

essorer, autoriser, liquéfier, cancaner,
the burning ice which was of course
the body between paradox
inside a tent of skin
unwrapping organs with two eyes
they call (our) planets in orbit around
lost saturday's rotisseries
and we'll all be graduate students forever
in phonetic manners metaclosure
remembering parks forget
their golf course mandates in penumbra
the homeless
settle in as antimatter at the same time
a labyrinth of flint hits syntax
as a throat tongue and six teeth form
a hebrew letter meaning aids
intellect and capital in drag
the paper occupied by paint a "had-to"
into focus drawing out to new communities
from vertigo
         (from "ATTRITIONS", Steve McCaffery)
____________________________________

Again, Al, and closer to home, and the linguicides on Canadian shores. Why bother to compare them. With the self-portrait of the artist, with real poets and hewers of verse in Ontario, as indeed with all "old men with brains on fire", all the Purdys turned to statues and looking always deep, manes ruffled in the wind,  it's always like this. Everything else, even on Canadian shores, is just vertigo and antipoetry.

The Poet turned to stone and the early-decaying poetry of Steve McCaffery: look for them and see the difference yourself.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
— how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?
         (from "The Dead Poet", Al Purdy)

The bad...

Day is a type when visible
objects change then put


on form but the anti-type
That thing not shadowed


The way music is formed of
cloud and fire once actually


concrete now accidental as
half truth or as whole truth


Is light anything like this
stray pencil commonplace


copy as to one aberrant
onward-gliding mystery
       (From "That This", Susan Howe)
_______________________

The clattering of definitions is irksome to the eye and ear, and particularly to the ear: the predictable obeisance to the usual "objects", "form" and (always after Zukofsky) "music" accompanied by the fawning self-congratulations round a grand piano. One turn through the Science & Technology pages is more than enough to fill Howe's verse, reinforced always by a few choice admonitions to look "disjunctive" with lots of space. Is the poem "visible" or "form", "half truth" or "whole truth"? But "lumberjacks", "farmers" and "women" are as real in Purdy as the words of flesh of which the Purdy poem is made. As perhaps only Chris Faiers knows it best, Al's not a name but a place of fest and friendships, sturdy (decades-old) A-frames and cold lakes. Where Al lived and wrote, now worthy of writers'-residence sanctity, is the hearth of the poem, particularly the Canadian. And because Purdy's Canadian, and the poem and the place, Howe's imported linguicide can't touch it.

This is "song", man; that is just prescribed Zukofskian sheet "music".

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

'Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!'

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
                                          (from "A Birthday Present", Sylvia Plath)

The bad...

We thought it could all be found in The Book of Poor Text,
the shadow the boat casts, angled mast, fretted wake, indigo eye.

Windows of the blind text,
keening, parabolic nights.

And the rolling sun, sun tumbling
into then under, company of moths.

Can you hear what I'm thinking, from there, even as you sleep?
Streets of the Poor Text, where a child's gaze falls

on the corpse  of a horse beside a cart,
whimpering dog, woman's mute mouth agape

as if to say, We must move on,
we must not stop, we must not watch.
                              (from "Company of Moths", Michael Palmer)
___________________________

The voice of irrationality or life by accident: whose is better here? Palmer's, again, seeps like gas to bubble at the surface or plugs space so full of incommensurabilities the next line's as predictable as "Can you hear what I'm thinking..."Predictable as the rest. But the gift, the veil or whatever's behind it, in Plath could not have been more simply intuited because more stylistically attuned to its devastating mundaneness and cruelty, as gift. There's a world here to gather & all the distant tragedies enclosed therein (as we very well know): the conditions of a verse's ceaseless and unstinting possibility. Again, what killed Plath is precisely the "closed window" of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E text, long long after the fact. It always has just this way, by wresting the 'being' out of us, of foreclosing the past in a willfulness that amounts to linguicide.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E is a linguicide and here is the second proof.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

"My dear Lady Anne,
 I've done what I can"
                   (Rolling Stones)




The good...

On the day of breasts and small hips
the window pocked with bad rain,
rain coming on like a minister,
we coupled, so sane and insane.
We lay like spoons while the sinister
rain dropped like flies on our lips
and our glad eyes and our small hips.
                         (from "Song for a Lady", Anne Sexton)

The bad...

A voice that eludes reason, manner of insistences,
hope doubled upon oration, bubbles the turf you
won't be wanting any more in the morning

                        My name is "Interrogation Rooms"
                        My name is "Refamiliarization"
                        My name is "Standing Up and Ripping Through"

as if you could name love
without turning it into an abstraction
& killing it
                              (from "Taps", Charles Bernstein)
______________________________________

Now Bernstein's poem's already done its worst by the time you get to the refrain. How? Again, the same bubbling through (as of gas) to the surface.Yes, "bubble the turf". I can believe we're talking about 'love' in both cases here but only in order to look at "Taps" as the cause of death. Bernstein's is gas main warning to wary diggers. Yes, here's the poem so portentously murderous it killed Anne Sexton long after her time. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E kills just like this.

It's not as far-fetched as it looks. Consider. Sexton's is a pure window on loving, with or without morning. So it wasn't necessary for Bernstein to foreground "Taps" in light at all. Through the fragility and even cute mousiness of physical intimacy Sexton gives the most pleasurable song imaginable to the world, with or without names. Damn, "light" and the very name for it in Bernstein's poem fly from each other like exploding gas molecules! Anyone looking for love poetry after this is bound to be staring into nothing but noxious dusk. Epithalamiums like Anne's, on the other hand, can make the stars race because she was as clever as you, Ph.d boy, and looked as ravishing as a middle-aged Liz Taylor, with or without small hips, & could love "so sane and insane" it'd even make your own wife glad for eyes, if you weren't so busy archiving. So Anne died twice: once in her car and then on Bernstein's bubbling turf.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E kills in just this way.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

To look at the river made of time and water
And remember that time is another river,
To know that we are lost like the river
And that faces dissolve like water.

To be aware that waking dreams it is not asleep
While it is another dream, and that the death
That our flesh goes in fear of is that death
Which comes every night and is called sleep.
                       (from "Ars Poetica", Jorge Luis Borges)

The bad...

I am writing now in preconceptions

Those of sex and ropes

Many frantic cruelties occur to the flesh of the

                              imagination

And the imagination does have flesh to destroy

And the flesh has imagination to sever

The mouth is just a body filled with imagination
                                 (from "Elegy", Lyn Hejinian)
__________________________

Nothing deep-sixes the poem more than misused space. Hejinian's "Elegy" is the proof. It's in that senseless space of hers. The place of 'repetition' is in Borges peopled with spirits and waters, and the faery borders between them. Spaces are here a violation. He dreams waters and a beautifully irreal order follows; Hejinian, trying to impress Silliman and Watten only, has managed to clumsily string a venerable form through the most random word associations (which perhaps explains the need for so much notebook space). It's not surprising that imagination ends in the oral cavity. Borges, loner with little formal education, teaches more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together; Borges, the working-class librarian had read more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together; Borges, the blind poet sees more than Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together.

The "Ars Poetica" of Jorge Luis Borges, or only the two strophes cited, hold more than all the Language of Silliman, Watten and Hejinian put together. Borges ends in a waking dream.                   

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

An unhappy people in a happy world--
Read, rabbi, the phases of this difference.
An unhappy people in an unhappy world--

Here are too many mirrors for misery.
A happy people in an unhappy world--
It cannot be. There's nothing there to roll

On the expressive tongue, the finding fang.
                   (from "The Auroras of Autumn", Wallace Stevens)

The bad...

Hypothesis of parasitic-push-outwards.

She sucks on his hypothesis.

Turns it in her mouth until there's a lozenge-shaped crevasse
that begins to slice sides off her tongue.

A hank of chopped silence gathers.

Verification slides his black eyes toward her
to check the effect against the ammonia.
                    (from MODESTY: LESSON NO. 2, Karen Houle)
_______________________________

Without meaning to be one Stevens's verse is philosophic; Houle's is, however, simply there, opened in front of her like the academic's connect-the-dots imitation of a favourite author. Stevens's "Auroras" is, beyond even the philosophic, a very mirroring Torah and the mystery between itself and the Master of the Universe never more reverentially problematized. Of course, it's never apparent to the readerly sense and yet the mysteries of an autumn season were never more happily read. The quickening cynicism of a people condemned to be unhappy in an unhappy land is a very jewel refracted (and never just vulgarly seen) in poetic light. By contrast, "hank of chopped silence" is a rather stupidly misappropriated sense of movement and rhythm altogether. Even in the age of différance, the stupidly misappropriated movement of a "hank of chopped silence"...

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

When your meadows lie cold, O Lord,
When the endless Angelus falls silent
In every crumbling hamlet...
Strike down your dear delicious crows
From boundless skies above
To nature's deflowered ground.

Strange armies with cries that crack,
Cold nests that winds attack.
Along yellow rivers,
Along old cross roads,
Around ditches, around holes,
Mobilize and go.
                     (from "Crows", Arthur Rimbaud)

The bad...

These high chestnut branches along Larch Street
fade above the streetlights,
                                            live without me.

A truck passes in the morning,
                                             it is full summer,
and a flock of noisy starlings leaps into the sky.

I jump from my top step,
                                             and sprawl on the lawn,
eyeglasses bouncing twice along the walk.
                                       (from "ELEGY FOUR", George Bowering)
_____________________________________

Could the dull denuded language in a Bowering elegy at least strike the ear as Eastern or something? Anything but this! In Rimbaud there's both ear and elegy, and a luxuriousness as of the world's first fresh assault. Bowering the Laureate, like all of them, is prescribed reading and strikes the eye with the gnawing ordinariness of the teen at your door, late again, holding his coke can. It's nothing ever (with bad Canadian verses) but this teen at your door. Could the "eyeglasses bouncing twice" have at least been knocked off this poet's ordinary face with force, for once? That would be some comfort. Anything but this, please! Rimbaud, however, and this bears repeating, looses on us a pissed off crow or two, tired of the rustic Angelus, and gives to my rightful hatred of Canadian ordinariness and national pietism the almost perfect fresh nest line and texture, as gift: the first perfect crack of attacking bird and sky.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

What's good...

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.
Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,
Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
That night of time under the Christward shelter:
I am the long world's gentlemen, he said,
And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
The planet-ducted pelican of circles
Weans on an artery the genders strip;
Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
You by the cavern over the black stairs,
Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
Are but the roots of nettles and feathers
Over the groundwork's thrusting through a pavement
And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers, etc.
                         ("Altarwise by Owl-Light" by Dylan Thomas)

What's bad...


same as books for the blind music
for the deaf bridge always thought
to be an elevator initially collapses but you
ego subject integral identity central conscious
you begin as feel it set against the problem
you always think of as somebody else's body
bodies body's body or bodies either here
where you don't hear where not listening
it begins to be alone alive just in time to stay
waiting same as food for the ones without mouths
same as philosophy
wit
essence
presence
just a moment ago ego move end subject
same as identical amenable reliable same as
magnifying practice signifying praxis integral
horizontal vertical diagonal syllogistic monistic
mnemonic anemic but forgets nothing of the mouth
month countrified begin it all beginnings
beginning to end with the upper palate
its anger on profit its transmission it's locale
the imaginal vaginal time that it left with
Tibet in bed saying that too has a meaning
having said it understands that having seen, etc
                  ("Slightly Left of Thinking" by Steve McCaffery)
______________________________________

Just what's needed to evince differences between rhythms and stone cold 'thinking'. For Thomas a simple amble through apses and an abandoned abbey's "black stairs"is enough to make stars or the poet's prayers the "spark in a shapeless country" (second in lyrical efficacy only to Rilke). Here's an intertextuality the post-avants can't even imagine. The abysmal lack of heart-and wood-depth in McCaffery, on the other hand, is not to be believed: the absence, in particular, of any visible prayer wheels though blessed Tibet be mentioned. Do note the concern in both Thomas and Crane for the safety of children and the tranquility of vision, as the two are inseparable. Again, the slaughter of the innocents laid bare on cold slabs of "horizontal vertical diagonal syllogistic monistic" is never far from this type of bad: badlands of thought where mutants and offenses thrive and poetry is all but impossible.

Constellations, and sidereal influences in general, have enough nearness to real tides and affairs to stand a chance in verse. But where are the spaces (never abyssal only!) interwoven with the possibility of some sense in McCaffery that might turn it into more than chronic gibberish? I fairly believe poetry as bad as this is a pathology and a poet as bad as this a destroyer of heaven's eggs.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf

Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.

They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,

And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed

Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections

The sun beats lightning on the waves,

The waves fold thunder on the sand;

And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,

Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached

By time and the elements; but there is a line

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses

Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

                                     (from Voyages, Hart Crane)

The bad...

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman A Dada bard

as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an

alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars

all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A

A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh- a hand-

stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a, etc

                                         (from Eunoia, Christian Bök)

__________________________

    Vowels have never looked like tiny white coffins (for children) strewn across the hangar floor, at least not til now. The only 'A' more horrific than this is Zukofsky's (Samperi was right to note its hellishness).Take a look at them. This is a Shoah. A wise man a little more generously said, "...conceptual writing is a con, a long hit of laughing gas, a pseudo-intellectual's wet dream. Taking it seriously is dimwitted, although it can, evidently, lead to tenure, where every day is "poetry" month." And that's that.

Crane, on the other hand, can visit this without upsetting a single fragment, the urchins safe at play, language of shores falling freely between their fingers. Like a wise parent cautioning against the pseudo-doctors who save themselves the trouble of lopping off heads and feet and use children instead, he draws a line in the sand for them and gives the colours, shades and textures of real sea graves as warning. Poets like wise parents caution always against transgressions and transgressors. Crane at least died knowing what lay beyond. A sea's cruel nursing breast...

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? . . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
                                                              (from the "Ninth Elegy", Rilke)

The bad...

We maintain a critical distance
from the sad spaniel gentlemen

in cravats
on the plaid duvet

at the Custom Hotel,
Los Angeles.

We are so over it.
We fly

from terminal
to terminal

almost endlessly.

We are almost
money.

We can wait
at high speed.
         ("Custom" by Rae Armantrout)
___________________________

Try capturing 'eternity' in the fall of the poet's laurel: oh! you  silly avants who've been cornered long ago and thought you'd never run out of room. Even stupid enough to think the world's been the repository of creative tensions all along: a place of fateful angels. Perse had accepted his laurels in '60 as a harbinger of precisely this. Where were you? Well, don't look now. I mean I can't even homage significant differences in this case-- breaking it down into two sides--because (besides being laughable) it'd soon turn into a staring contest and the winner would certainly go to the sturdiest brow and most penetrating eye. Nothing in the poetry is worth mentioning. But in America it just won't go to brows and insight. The look of the thing might go happily to American cute cheeks and some contrasting eye-glinting sparkle to take to the Pulitzer podium: not just the poem for which we can wait but a little eyeliner and pearls, even in mid-life. Tributes to dogs and duvet floors will carry the day at LA X. And between Rilke and Armantrout: well, cutes and sparkles win hands down every time!

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

    "I know you, monster-head! Once more face to face. We
take up the long debate where we left off.
    And you may urge your arguments like snouts low over
the water: I will leave you no rest and no respite.
    On too many frequented shores have my footsteps been
washed away before the day, on too many deserted beds has
my soul been delivered up to the cancer of silence.
    What more do you want of me, O breath of origin? And
you, what more would you drag from my living lips..."
                                                                      (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

The bad...

Word's a sentence before it's a word -- I write
Sentences -- When words are, meaning soon follows -- Where
words join, writing is -- One's writing is one writing --
Not all letters are equal -- 2 phrases yield an angle --
Eye settles in the middle of word, left of center -- Reference
is a compass -- Each day -- Performance seeks
vaudeville -- Composition as investigation -- Collage is a
false democracy -- Spelling's choices
                                                             (from FOR L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Ron Silliman)
____________________

Again, Perse's perfect mythopoeia and language fit, drinking at the same stream. And think of all the great  monsters it's foreseen: from Sidney to Proust. I've borrowed his Peregrine and made the conversions to dark exilic moods myself. With him I've made cancer-leafs and burned Jesuits with the anvil-necklace for wanting illusional peewit wives. I know who the Father really is. Why do only the great Talmudists, the great ones! get to enjoy a language fit for the Master of the Universe? La simple chose que voilà applied to skeletons and shores...? Why can't Perse be my Corman?


In Silliman's abcediary a word, phrase & sentence at a time peck in the dirt, envying the superior snouts. Not being one means he has to form the vowels with his ope lips and blow them out, a disgraceful ritual that's sometimes sputters through the beard. In fact, there's neither sense nor Sentence here if you look carefully, just the child's rambling (minus the child's imaginative vision), the sand (minus the seas). Silliman writes sentences (and nothing could be easier) while Perse breathes. In Silliman a series of equal signs to help connect the lines while Perse's "a language free of usage and pure". Silliman's banausic verse fit for advisory boards...puffing at the shores.

April is poetry month: what's good and what's not



St.-John Perse

In honour of April poetry month I will post (hopefully every day for the entire month) what's hot and what's not:i.e. a good poem and a bad poem placed one under the other, with some comments on why the one's good and the other's not.

The good...

"...There has always been this clamour, there has al-
ways been this splendour.
    And like a great feat of arms on the march across the
world, like a census of peoples in exodus, like a foundation of
empires in praetorian tumult, ah! like an animation of lips
over the birth of great Books,
    This huge muffled thing loose in the world, and suddenly
growing huger like drunkenness..." (from Exile, St.-John Perse)

and the bad...

I am not chosen
but have applied for the job.
I've always wanted to be a Government
of Canada initiative. Starves his body down
so his erection will be proportionally larger
                                                          (Colin Smith from "Straw Man")
________________

Perse's poetry (even in translation: this excerpt in its original French would have made the Smith blemishes look even more laughable) is epical and yet reachable: beautifully cadenced and yet within reach of the feeling eye. But what an eye Perse requires! Not afraid of repetitions because repetitions always, even to infinity, carry something in the poet's pouch nor even of the lonely journey across the piaggia diserta of the songless world, the poem "grows". Yes, the impression it leaves is of a poem flowering even when the covers close.

Smith's offering, sadly in only one of Canada's two official languages, will always remain the "songless" and certainly not through lack of trying. Here's Kootenay writing school specimen holding up the mirror as 'twere to a very purposeful "hysterical, disavowed and disjunctive" initiative. It's what it is and Canada's just the place for it. ( I redden at it) Drunkenness here is always tantamount to smoking teenage weed.