"Somebody Loves Us All"

I've often wondered where, exactly, LaLa Land was located, and thanks to the Washington Post, I now know. Read the bottom 2 paragraphs on page 1 and the top paragraph on page 2 for a precis. One, one, one...

Per Peter's Request, a Parod-elle

ONE MORE: AFTER ELIZABETH BISHOP’S ONE ART
(and perhaps addressed to The Prodigal)

The art of boozing isn’t hard to master.
So many drinks seem filled with the intent
To be drunk that drinking, drunk, is no disaster.

Drink something every round. Tell that old bastard
Of a bartender you’ll drink until you’re skint.
The art of boozing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice drinking harder, drinking faster,
Spend happy and happier hours, spend up the rent
to be drunk. Drinking, drunk is no disaster.

You drank your apartment up. And look, your last or
Next to last of folded twenties went
To buy a round. The art of boozing isn’t hard to master.

You’ve lost two days (lovely ones, while plastered
Like pig shit to a wall), your job, the argument
That to be drunk, being drunk is no disaster.

Even now, as you belly up to the bar
Like a sick fish floating, it’s evident
The art of boozing isn’t hard to master.
As you drink doubles—prodigality’s no disaster.

One Word: Unconscious Mutterings

1. Long distance:: love affair
   
2. Meant to be:: I know what I know, says the almanac.
   
3. Here:: and Now
   
4. Endless:: Enduring
   
5. Resentment:: Sibling rivalry
   
6. Insipid:: Mariah
   
7. Bunny:: Easter
   
8. Slogan:: Lingo
   
9. Naked:: Morning
   
10. Sarcasm:: Swift
    

One Word: Appeal

Commercial Appeal, the local paper; appeal to apple--so little the distance between apple, and appall--I wonder if they felt like that in Paradise before they were evicted

Short story: 11 pages--it's finished. I tried for 15 but could only get there if I changed the font to 18-point.
Blank verse assignment: 35 lines. Done. (AARGH--this was hard).
Three poems for MFA packet: Done.
Character sketch for workshop: Done (rough 30 line poem).
Poem for Workshop: Done. (don't know about the small lines but like the poem)

Dreadfully behind on reading and journaling for the MFA poetry class. I've only read one complete book (Barnett) and am still writing about it. I've decided it's not really confessional in the sense of scandal but is confessional in the sense of soul-baring. I think the point of view allows for the epiphany/epiphanies.

One Word: Click (going to the office for reading during a film in second grade)

UPDATE: Folks it's a twofer--I could do two words in 24 hours:

Here's the first One Word Entry:
Word: CLICK
TITLE: Going to the Office for Reading During a Film in Second Grade)

Click goes the switch, click goes the ballpoint pen, and click go the heels of the teacher's shoes down the linoleum-over-concrete hallway (like marble but not like marbles), click like the beetle in the science film; clack like the reel that's sputtered--Our Insect Friends, clack of the metal slam of a locker behind you; click you go under the big clock with its bell; click tick, tock clock, you are in her wake dragged past the cloakroom as teacher's clicking her heels and clucking her tongue: DON'T YOU EVER READ IN CLASS AGAIN!

Here's the second One Word Entry:
WORD: KNOW
TITLE: Love's a Four Letter Word (just like poem)

Know, knew, I knew a woman lovely in her bones; to know her was to know her, biblically--would that be by the book, to know someone biblically? Would there be red-letter events, or parables (ah the teachable moment), or maybe songs? Would there be lamentations, prophesies, or even speaking in unknown tongues, that glossolalia?

Subliminal Mutterings

1. Alone:: Eben Flood
   
2. Science:: What she blinded me with
   
3. Deposit:: Downpayment
   
4. Faithful:: Griselda
   
5. Tender:: Mercies
   
6. Chocolate:: The REAL vitamin C
   
7. Homework:: Drowning in it
   
8. Tamper:: Proof
   
9. Friend:: Pattie
   
10. Wire:: Slinky
    

My Favorite Logo Gets Trivialized!

Ten Top Trivia Tips about The Marlboro Man!

1. It takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun's surface to The Marlboro Man.
2. The Marlboro Man was originally called Cheerioats.
3. Only fifty-five percent of men wash their hands after using The Marlboro Man!
4. Most bottles and jars contain at least twenty-five percent recycled Marlboro Man.
5. If the annual Australian Marlboro Man crop was laid end to end, it would stretch around the world seven times.
6. Research indicates that The Marlboro Man will be attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas!
7. The Marlboro Man can smell some things up to six miles away.
8. The Marlboro Man can drink over 25 gallons of water at a time.
9. All shrimp are born as The Marlboro Man, but gradually mature into females.
10. Forty percent of the world's almonds and twenty percent of the world's peanuts are used in the manufacture of The Marlboro Man.

Jung Love (First Love)

I never know how to take these tests. My thinking and feeling were equally split. Maybe I'm Solomon's baby.

INFP - "Questor". High capacity for caring. Emotional face to the world. High sense of honor derived from internal values. 4.4% of total population.

Take Free Jung Personality Test
personality tests by similarminds.com

"Let No Man Write My Epitaph"

Goodbye, Shelley...A Place in the Sun, Lolita, A Patch of Blue, I Am a Camera,, The Anne Frank Story....one of my favorites.

Weekly Word Assn.

1. Paralyzed:: Immobile
   
2. Bossy:: Mom
   
3. Worth:: Mary to my friends
   
4. Breathing:: Shallow
   
5. Uneventful:: Stress-free
   
6. Return:: from MFA
   
7. Splint:: Shin
   
8. Notice:: Eviction
   
9. Hero:: Leander
   
10. Vulnerable:: Weakness exploited
    

From Peter's Blog

Ten Top Trivia Tips about Pamela!

My favorites are 4, 5, 6 and 10.

1. A lump of pamela the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
2. If you kiss pamela for one minute you will burn six or seven calories.
3. If you don't get out of bed on the same side you got in, you will have pamela for the rest of the day.
4. The ace of spades in a playing card deck symbolizes pamela. (I thought it meant death or at least a shovel).
5. All swans in England belong to pamela. (I will have to wrestle Wallace Stevens, as he owns them, also).
6. Pamela is the sacred animal of Thailand!
7. Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14, and pamela has 7. (So I am subhuman, and half vegetable).
8. An average beaver can cut down pamela every year. (As can a student in the MFA residency program--more on this later. My mantra, as the only woman in the poetry section was WWPSD--what would Patti Smith do?--and I tried to do it, although I did not rock at the reading)
9. Native Americans never actually ate pamela; killing such a timid prey was thought to indicate laziness.
10. While sleeping, fifteen percent of men snore, and ten percent grind their pamela! (Q: Is there a nightguard of some sort to alleviate such painful activity?)

Modernism, Take 5

Among School Children

I

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
The children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading - books and histories,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way - the children's eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

II

I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
That changed some childish day to tragedy -
Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
Or else, to alter Plato's parable,
Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

III

And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
I look upon one child or t'other there
And wonder if she stood so at that age -
For even daughters of the swan can share
Something of every paddler's heritage -
And had that colour upon cheek or hair,
And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
She stands before me as a living child.

IV

Her present image floats into the mind -
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
And I though never of Ledaean kind
Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
Better to smile on all that smile, and show
There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

V

What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
Honey of generation had betrayed,
And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
As recollection or the drug decide,
Would think her Son, did she but see that shape
With sixty or more winters on its head,
A compensation for the pang of his birth,
Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

VI

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

VII

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother's reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts - O presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
O self-born mockers of man's enterprise;

VIII

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

-- W. B. Yeats

Six Modernist Classics, Take Four

The last stanza of this poem is something I would save from fire. It's saved me many times before, and it's is saving me in the MFA program now.


Sunday Morning--Wallace Stevens

1
Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound.
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

2
Why should she give her bounty to the dead?
What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?
Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,
In pungent fruit and bright green wings, or else
In any balm or beauty of the earth,
Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?
Divinity must live within herself:
Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;
Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued
Elations when the forest blooms; gusty
Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;
All pleasures and all pains, remembering
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measure destined for her soul.

3
Jove in the clouds had his inhuman birth.
No mother suckled him, no sweet land gave
Large-mannered motions to his mythy mind.
He moved among us, as a muttering king,
Magnificent, would move among his hinds,
Until our blood, commingling, virginal,
With heaven, brought such requital to desire
The very hinds discerned it, in a star.
Shall our blood fail? Or shall it come to be
The blood of paradise? And shall the earth
Seem all of paradise that we shall know?
The sky will be much friendlier then than now,
A part of labor and a part of pain,
And next in glory to enduring love,
Not this dividing and indifferent blue.

4
She says, "I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?"
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven's hill, that has endured
As April's green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow's wings.

5
She says, "But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss."
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves.

6
Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

7
Supple and turbulent, a ring of men
Shall chant in orgy on a summer morn
Their boisterous devotion to the sun,
Not as a god, but as a god might be,
Naked among them, like a savage source.
Their chant shall be a chant of paradise,
Out of their blood, returning to the sky;
And in their chant shall enter, voice by voice,
The windy lake wherein their lord delights,
The trees, like serafin, and echoing hills,
That choir among themselves long afterward.
They shall know well the heavenly fellowship
Of men that perish and of summer morn.
And whence they came and whither they shall go
The dew upon their feet shall manifest.

8
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, "The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay."
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.

Rilke and Dinggedichte

Bowl of Roses

You saw angry ones flare, saw two boys
clump themselves together into a something
that was pure hate, thrashing in the dirt
like an animal set upon by bees;
actors, piled up exaggerators,
careening horses crashed to the ground,
their gaze thrown away, baring their teeth
as if the skull peeled itself out through the mouth.

But now you know how these things are forgotten:
for here before you stands a bowl full of roses,
which is unforgettable and filled up
with ultimate instances
of being and bowing down,
of offering themselves, of being unable to give, of standing there
almost as part of us: ultimates for us too.

Noiseless life, opening without end,
filling space without taking any away
from the space the other things in it diminish,
almost without an outline, like something omitted,
and pure inwardness, with so much curious softness,
shining into itself, right up to the rim:
is anything as known to us as this?

And this: that a feeling arises
because petals are being touched by petals?
And this: that one opens itself, like a lid,
and beneath lies nothing but eyelids,
all closed, as if tenfold sleep
had to dampen down an inner power to see.
And, above all, this: that through the petals
light has to pass. Slowly they filter out from a
thousand skies the drop of darkness
in whose fiery glow the jumbled bundle
of stamens becomes aroused and rears up.

And what activity, look, in the roses:
gestures with angles of deflection so small
one wouldn't see them if not for
infinite space where their rays can diverge.

See this white one, blissfully opened,
standing among its huge spreading petals
like a Venus standing in her shell;
and how this one, the blushing one, turns,
as if confused, toward the cooler one,
and how the cooler one, impassive, draws back,
and the cold one stands tightly wrapped in itself
among these opened ones, that shed everything.
And what they shed, how it can be
at once light and heavy. a cloak. a burden,
a wing, and a mask, it all depends,
and how they shed it: as before a lover.

Is there anything they can't be: wasn't this yellow one
that lies here hollow and open the rind
of a fruit of which the same yellow,
more intense, more orange-red, was the juice?
And this one, could opening have been too much for it,
because, exposed to air, its nameless pink
has picked up the bitter aftertaste of lilac?
And isn't this batiste one a dress, with
the chemise still inside it, still soft
and breath-warm, both flung off together
in morning shade at the bathing pool in the woods?
And this one here, opalescent porcelain,
fragile, a shallow china cup
filled with little lighted butterflies,
and this one, containing nothing but itself.

And aren't they all doing the same: only containing themselves,
if to contain oneself means: to transform the world outside
and wind and rain and patience of spring
and guilt and restlessness and disguised fate
and darkness of earth at evening
all the way to the errancy, flight, and coming on of clouds
all the way to the vague influence of the distant stars
into a handful of inwardness.

Now it lies free of cares in the open roses.

(translated by Galway Kinell and Hannah Liebman)

______
Odd fact of the day: Rilke died of an infection that began after he pricked himself on a thorn while cutting roses in his garden.

MFA-Bound

Wish me luck and all that.

Pamela

From "An Octopus" by Marianne Moore

if one would "conquer the main peak of Mount Tacoma,
this fossil flower concise without a shiver,
intact when it is cut.
damned for its sacrosanct remoteness—
like Henry James "damned by the public for decorum";
not decorum, but restraint;
it is the love of doing hard things
that rebuffed and wore them out—a public out of sympathy with neatness.
Neatness of finish! Neatness of finish!
Relentless accuracy is the nature of this octopus
with its capacity for fact.

Apparently, ole Helmut's getting lucky this year!

Or maybe it's just me...since I'm a Cancer. Laughing my astrology off.

Poetry for January

From David Young's essay: (on Poetry Daily Website)

I have concluded that the modernist narrative is really many narratives at once and that modernist poetic practice as I understand and value it can best be demonstrated through close attention to six exemplary poems: Rainer Maria Rilke's "The Bowl of Roses," W. B. Yeats's "Among School Children," Wallace Stevens's "Sunday Morning," William Carlos Williams's "January Morning," Marianne Moore's "An Octopus," and Eugenio Montale's "Mediterranean."

Here's one of these exemplaries:

January Morning (Suite)--William Carlos Williams

I

I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them:
the domes of the Church of
the Paulist Fathers in Weehawken
against a smoky dawn -- the heart stirred --
are beautiful as Saint Peters
approached after years of anticipation.

II

Though the operation was postponed
I saw the tall probationers
in their tan uniforms
hurrying to breakfast!

III

-- and from basement entries
neatly coiffed, middle aged gentlemen
with orderly moustaches and
well-brushed coats

IV

-- and the sun, dipping into the avenues
streaking the tops of
the irregular red houselets,
and
the gay shadows drooping and drooping.

V

-- and a young horse with a green bed-quilt
on his withers shaking his head:
bared teeth and nozzle high in the air!

VI

--and a semicircle of dirt-colored men
about a fire bursting from an old
ash can,

VII

-- and the worn,
blue car rails (like the sky!)
gleaming among the cobbles!

VIII

-- and the rickety ferry-boat "Arden"!
What an object to be called "Arden"
among the great piers, -- on the
ever new river!
"Put me a Touchstone
at the wheel, white gulls, and we'll
follow the ghost of the Half Moon
to the North West Passage -- and through!
(at Albany!) for all that!"

IX

Exquisite brown waves -- long
circlets of silver moving over you!
enough with crumbling ice crusts among you!
The sky has come down to you,
lighter than tiny bubbles, face to
face with you!
His spirit is
a white gull with delicate pink feet
and a snowy breast for you to
hold to your lips delicately!

X

The young doctor is dancing with happiness
in the sparkling wind, alone
at the prow of the ferry! He notices
the curdy barnacles and broken ice crusts
left at the slip's base by the low tide
and thinks of summer and green
shell-crusted ledges among
the emerald eel-grass!

XI

Who knows the Palisades as I do
knows the river breaks east from them
above the city -- but they continue south
-- under the sky -- to bear a crest of
little peering houses that brighten
with dawn behind the moody
water-loving giants of Manhattan.

XII

Long yellow rushes bending
above the white snow patches;
purple and gold ribbon
of the distant wood:
what an angle
you make with each other as
you lie there in contemplation.

XIII

Work hard all your young days
and they'll find you too, some morning
staring up under
your chiffonier at its warped
bass-wood bottom and your soul --
out!
-- among the little sparrows
behind the shutter.

XIV

-- and the flapping flags are at
half-mast for the dead admiral.

XV

All this --
was for you, old woman.
I wanted to write a poem
that you would understand.
For what good is it to me
if you can't understand it?
But you got to try hard --
But --
Well, you know how
the young girls run giggling
on Park Avenue after dark
when they ought to be home in bed?
Well,
that's the way it is with me somehow.

I am crushed and in desperate need of new shoes to get me over this.

According to Face Recognition: I bear a striking resemblance (greater than 60%) to:

Doris Lessing
Courtney Love
Lucille Ball
Walter Mondale
Ava Gardner
Sharon Tate, and the winner...
Helmut Kohl

I knew that 50 was fast upon me (1-1/2 years), but Helmut Kohl????? I am now purged of any remaining vanity.

Better Late than Never (for Brian, wherever you are)

Well, it's a semester late, but here's my last workshop assignment from 2005. The assignment was to write a poem that sounds nothing like your regular work, to use two quotes and a title that originate with three other poets, to make the draft 15 lines long with more than 11 syllables per line, to use caesuras, and to avoid all punctuation (except in the quotes). I finally did it thanks to a post by ADT. I don't think it's finished, but at least it's on the virtual page. I wish I could save the spacing, because it makes this a little easier to read.

For a Friend I Can’t Find

“Nothing is ever lost.” All the King’s Men

“Let our scars fall in love.” The Book of Nightmares

Crescent cut through my eyebrow falling onto your bedpost
then seven stitches so small they were set in
with a loupe Cat-claw on my left fourth finger from

trying to trap that tabby (cicatrix hidden under your class
Ring) Stigmata on my right palm you suddenly on top of me,
in gravel some car backfiring and you back in

Vung Tau (landing on a Coke bottle glass splinters still
rising like floaters in spring) Left calf caterpillar-shaped scar
That time toppling out of the old oak onto barbed wire

Butterflied not sutured because it was cheaper (“Did you know
the French word for caterpillar is chenille” you quizzing me in
the emergency room) How everything seemed urgent then

remembering each accident you telling me when we parted
that nothing is ever lost now cataloguing scars and thinking
again of Warren and of Kinnell how all things lead me to love

MFA is 4 days away...

I'm reading Anthony Hecht like there's no tomorrow...Hopefully, I'll be able to re-read everything else on the list, but Hecht's killing me on first read: Formal, austere, bleak, and sometimes hilarious ("Ghost in the Martini").

I guess I need to pack my martini sweater.

Happy New Year from Bill and Me

Wordsworth, from the NYT. Woodcut. "The World Is Too Much with Us."

We have given our hearts away. A sordid boon.