Mrs. Smith: as a runner reminisces

" Ed è bel modo rettorico, quando di fuori pare la cosa disabbellirsi, e dentro veramente s'abbellisce." (Dante)

________


Well, without the name how stunningly serene and sweet both Smiths can be
(such as I've met them, drawn to their bells and heat)  

Now there's Smith I see  grown to an infinitesimally cute orchard lot, hips and boots
tramped into mud & her quietly retracting vines,

who's dove-sweet in just that way: as I'd imagined it in one corner of eye. But lovely, too,
 is Smith the portrait and any of her poetical breeds, drawn from brow

to her elegant chin. Again, a lumbering sort of road ahead and she were mated, to me,
as the portrait of any sweetly doughty matron can certainly be--

I'd say, in fact, the Smith I see and that other's sweet doughty pic really can be the same
to the runner who dreams such disparities as these,

but primarily that between a Lady and some imagined mud on the road ahead
_____________________


*Poem inspired by a portrait of Mrs. E.D.Smith which hangs in the Red Carriage House at the Erland Lee estate but dedicated  to the elderly-elegant Mrs.Smith who still resides in her clapboard house beside an abandoned orchard. 

If only she knew..

A Spring verse by Rilke...devastatingly beautiful (to me)

(from "The Seventh Elegy")

No longer, voice. No longer let wooing send forth your cry:
you're past that. Even though your cry would be clear as a bird's
when first Spring bears him aloft, almost forgetting
that he's a cautious creature and not an unsheathed heart
being flung into brightness, in passionate skies.
Like him, with all his art, you'd also woo--: invisibly,
so that some silent mate might learn of you, and,
as she listened, a reply would slowly wake and grow warm--
the kindled complement of your own ardent feeling

Post-Erland Lee poetry (for Jeff Seffinga)

Poetry in the Carriage House

It's been another successful Erland Lee poetry reading. After a two-year change of venue it was good to meet old friends and read poetry again in the red Carriage House. I was particularly moved by the poetry of Jeff Seffinga, editor of Tower Poetry magazine: moved enough to write the following poem (for him)


"On Hearing Jeff say"

that the deer among wolves, quietly sore, a sweet
  Tempe in a savage place can be
   deadly

   But how exactly?

Well (I'd say) like a dirty crushing street-poet deadly
                                                        (poet of letters only!)

  but he'd say, no, like a hand's gentle absence, at dusk;
                                the cat's light wisdom ( dill on its lip):--
                                cat-heart getting lift from itself,
                                                   alone

           Of the poem in a savage place, Jeff'd say

       

Picture taken by Maria DiDiodato

"Morning prayers" (2): helen (of troy)

"good it is for man not to touch a woman"
                                                      (Tertullian)


       It's just like the greying
to execrate filth
  in light,  a woman's walk:

          small mouth and wisps
  trotting forward--

  "Some temple!"

who will try to be reintegrated
  to him under the tree

--"Adulterers won't ever attain"--

unshakeable column
     of
     grey
      reading
        under
         a
          tree

"Love. Leaf. Light." (for John Perlman)

"Tu non se’ in terra"
                          (Dante)


John says the vision narrowed to curtain slits,
                                                               in a city of the sun,
  made the sage and the rose scent one, &

poet who coincides with Leaf and Light  "telically" strung
  once wrote a sun- or plant- or sage-Love:--
                                                                    a Trilogy!

Appearing to John were even a room lone as a world & poet
                                                                on the Village streets,
  -- every situation never good with him --

  swept once into the heart, age-old and without quietude and
                                                                   a pilgrim's peace
                                                                     

John Bloomberg-Rissman and Conrad DiDiodato discuss 'conceptual poetry'

I'd like to thank John Bloomberg-Rissman for agreeing to talk to me about 'conceptual poetry' via Google+ 'hangout'. Below is the YouTube video of our discussion. I would like to post 'hangout' discussions from time to time. If the "medium is the message" there can be no doubt that Net technology conditions the very terms (and tone) of poetry discussion. It's quite remarkable to me that this two-person symposium could never have happened in the "paper" regime where space, means of production and meaning itself are governed by the powerful few.

The YouTube video can also be seen here.

Poll results

A warm thank you to those who took the time to do my poll. I may do one from time to time mostly to gauge opinion on recent events in the world of poetry. For example, it would have been interesting to take a survey on Ron Silliman's decision a few years back to close the comments stream at his blog. Find below the results of my poll, beginning with a sampling of opinion on the poll topic:


(a) "Of those listed here that would probably be Apollinaire. He was there at the beginning of modernism. His ""Zone"" was a huge influence on everybody, as were ""Lundi Rue Christine"" and the Calligrammes ... as were his writings on the cubist painters.
It's interesting that this list does not consist of contemporaries, e.g. Zukofsky and Char came along after modernism was in full swing."

(b)"Walt Whitman - an avant-modernist, so to speak (tongue a little in cheekily), who leads pretty directly to
WC Williams - I suspect that of the early modernists he has had the most influence in North America. He's kind the ""free verse according to speech rhythms"" guy.
HD - the ""imagiste"" queen. Imagism has been incredibly influential on modernism (I should add, thru Pound, too)"

(c)"[Apollinaire's] calligrams paved the way for a new genre - visual poetry, first exemplified in concrete poetry - the perception of a poem as a visual form of poetic expression.
Concrete poetry established the idea of presenting a poem as a ""word-object"" - to be looked at as well as read; from that point on, words on a page were to be considered for their spatial as well as for their semantic function.This led to ""visual poetry"", a genre that integrates text and image on the page, which then led to ""kinetic text"" (my term), a time-based form of presenting a poem as moving text on a screen and, eventually, to film poems or ""videopoetry"" (my term) wherein text is ""juxtaposed with image and sound to produce a poetic experience"" (my definition) as well as the forms of ""e-poetry"" - generative texts for example - which require the user's interactivity to create the poems."

(d) "Ezra Pound, because he championed the movement away from the flowery language of Victorian poetry and its sometimes cumbersome and abstract."
_____________________________

Which one literary figure listed below has, in your opinion, contributed the most towards creating a distinctively modern poetics?

Tristan Tzara	0	0%
Rainer Maria Rilke	2	20%
Guillaume Apollinaire	3	30%
Louis Zukofsky	1	10%
René Char	0	0%
Gertrude Stein	4	40%