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.